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?
There is really no reason to use self-signed anymore. I use Let’s Encrypt even for 10.0.0.0/8 addresses.
Except for the learning process and if you want your self-signed local domains in your lan !
https://jellyfin.homelab.domainis easier to access than IP addresses.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.
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 :(.
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.
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.
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.