Paid SSL vs Letsencrypt

brownmustardminion@lemmy.ml to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 104 points –

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?

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Not the only use cases, but you'd need a different service if you need/want wildcard certs, certs that are manually installed and managed, or certs with a longer expiration.

Letsencrypt issues wildcard certificates. This is however more complicated to setup.

I'd say they're actually easier, at least in my experience. Since wildcard certs use DNS-01 verification with an API, you don't need to deal with exposing port 80 directly to the internet.

Yes, it can be easier. But not every DNS provider allows API access, so you might need to change the provider.

(good luck with that in many enterprise scenarios).

You can also delegate a subdomain to another provider with an API, but yes I see what you mean. Although I feel like getting port 80 open would be difficult as well in those situations.

You can use ACNE DNS. Just add the single record for acne dns and then you can the acne dns api to fulfill the challange.

Yes, if you do this manually it will work.

No, you can do this process to automate it.

Sorry, I understood you wrong. You're right!

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