<i>Site owners really should be factoring the cost of certificate(s) into the operational costs of owning and running a site nowadays - just as they must with the domain, hosting, dns, email etc.</i><p>That's no problem for big sites, but it doesn't work for the "long tail". When a domain costs $8/year and you can get Web hosting ranging from free to $100/year, any paid cert starts to look disproportionately expensive. People will not blindly accept spending close to 50% of their budget on security.