Comment by ZeroConcerns
15 hours ago
Mostly Verisign, which required faxing forms and eye-watering amounts of money. Then Thawte, which brought down prices to a more manageable US$500 per host or so. Which might seem excessive, but was really peanuts compared to the price of the 'SSL accelerator' SBus card that you also needed to serve more than, like, 2 concurrent HTTPS connections.
And you try telling young people that ACME is a walk in the park, and they won't believe you...
And then sketchy resellers for Verisign/Thawte, which were cheap but invariably had websites that ironically did not inspire confidence in typing in your credit card number.
As GP posited, because of this headache, lots of web traffic was plain ol' HTTP. Let's Encrypt is owed a lot of credit for drastically reducing plain ol' HTTP.