I am thinking about getting one from hostgator for $75 a year and they would install it for free too. Are there any free or cheap good ones? just so i don't miss out on anything?
Create your own with openssl!! It's free but users may be prompted to confirm that they trust you (as the certificate is not signed by a "trusted" Certificate Authority). Search for 'self signed ssl certificate' with your favorite search engine and you should find plenty of tutorials on how to do it. It's quite straight forward (probably takes 15-30 mins for first-timers).
NameCheap were giving them free not to long ago if you purchased a domain from them, dont know if the offer is still on.
Ya NameCheap has some pretty inexpensive SSL certs. Make sure you have a dedicated IP for the certificate/account(URL) and generate the CSR accordingly
I would go with Godaddy because of the coupon codes. You can regularly get 12% discount or more, maybe 25% discount at checkout. Just sign up for their newsletter or do a Google search for coupon codes. Their standard SSL is domain validation only. The other certificates get expensive, for example the extended validation (EV) is about $500/year. But you can drive that price down easily.
I use CACERT.org. But Browsers detect report Security issue about it because it's not bundled because of non-famous CA.