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?
People who have actually relevant use cases with the need for a reliable partner would never use LE. It’s a gimmick for hobbyists and people who suck at their job.
If you have never revoked a certificate, you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you have never run into rate-limiting issues with LE that block a rollout, you don’t know what you’re doing.
LE works until it doesn’t, and then it’s like every other free service on the internet: no guarantees If your setup relies on the goodwill of a single entity handing out shit for free, it’s not a robust setup. If you rely on that entity to keep an OCSP responder alive for free so all your consumers can verify the validity of your certificate, that’s not great. And people do this to save their company $1 a month for the real thing? Even running the shitty certbot in compute has a larger cost. People are so blindly in love with this “free” garbage. The fanboys will never die off
I don’t understand what digicert could possibly do that Let’s encrypt doesn’t. Let’s encrypt is free and transparent. Digicert is just a relic from the past. Don’t believe me? Look at the number of websites using Let’s encrypt
Unless you are in a specific industry Let’s encrypt is a good and sane choice
We have had the opposite problem in the past. A cert provider requiring us to exist in certain international directories of companies took weeks of waiting around on bureaucratic red tape.
Then they didn’t even call us to verify our existance, place of business or anything (yeah, this was one of the big certificate providers a long time ago).
Their website was horrible, and their support wasn’t better.
LetsEncrypt though hasn’t failed me once since it was setup, and that is over hundreds of domains with thousands of renewals.