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?
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.
Whoa, really??? I guess I just assumed nothing changed in the last 5 years. I need to look into that.
I’ve set it up fully automated with traefik and dns challenges.
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 get wildcard certs with LetsEncrypt (since 2018): https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v2-production-environment-wildcards/55578
