IMHO, a SSL certificate should be free.
I use to host my web site with GoDaddy. They were great 15 years ago, but got worse with age. Their rates continued to go up and their service continued to decline. The final straw, for me, was when they called me on the phone and offered to add a SSL certificate for a mere $250 per year. I told them where they could put their certificate and went looking for a new host. Oddly enough, they never called me back again. I found a good web host, that is reasonably priced ($83 per year), and offers free SSL certificates at
DreamHost.
It was a bit of a pain to move everything from GoDaddy, but I didn't have to modify any of my links. On my web pages, at
www.k7mem.com, all of the links, to other internal objects, are relative (./). This includes images, Javascript, CSS, PDFs, etc.. So once you make a initial secure connection, every page is automatically secure.
DreamHost does notify me every time they update the SSL certificate.