I’m curious what the benefits are of paying for SSL certificates vs using a free provider such as letsencrypt.

What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications? What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?

In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?

And finally, which paid SSL providers are considered trustworthy?

I know Digicert is a big player, but their prices are insane. Comodo seems like a good affordable option, but is it a trustworthy company?

  • @[email protected]English
    4•3 months ago

    There is really no reason to use self-signed anymore. I use Let’s Encrypt even for 10.0.0.0/8 addresses.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•3 months ago

      Except for the learning process and if you want your self-signed local domains in your lan !

      https://jellyfin.homelab.domain is easier to access than IP addresses.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•3 months ago

        In that case, i recommend step-ca, which is a certificate authority server with acme support anyone can self host. The setup took a while but it’s been running for months now without problems for me.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•3 months ago

          Yeaaah I already played a bit arround with step-ca ! Right now a make a mini-CA with openssl.

          When I get more comfortable with how everything works together I will surely give step-ca another try.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•3 months ago

            I found open-ssl to be much harder to use. Do you just manually make new certificates with the CA in CLI?

      • @[email protected]English
        3•3 months ago

        I’ve been doing home networking for many years now and the public Domain + Cloudflare DNS + Let’s Encrypt is the easiest it’s ever been.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•3 months ago

          Can’t argue against that.

          However, I prefer local domain names accessible via Wireguard with self-signed certs. I like to understand how everything works under the hood !

          Also, I’m broke AF and buying a domain name (even cheap ones) are out of my budget :(.

          • qazEnglish
            2•3 months ago

            Numeric .xyz domains only cost $1 a year. They’re not great for things like mail because they’re often used by spammers (probably because of the price), but it’s great for cheap signed DNS hostnames.

            I point it to the server on my local network and use Wireguard to connect myself.