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?
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.
I’ve been there. Not every CA is equal. Those kind of CAs were shit. LE is convenient. There are more options though.