105
Paid SSL vs Letsencrypt
(lemmy.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
105 points (97.3% liked)
Selfhosted
40458 readers
94 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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
I actually agree. For the majority of sites and/or use cases, it probably is sufficient.
Explaining properly why LE is generally problematic, takes considerable depth of information, that I'm just not able to relay easily right now. But consider this:
LE is mostly a convenience. They save an operator $1 per month per certificate. For everyone with hosting costs beyond $1000, this is laughable savings. People who take TLS seriously often have more demands than "padlock in the browser UI". If a free service decides they no longer want to use OCSP, that's an annoying disruption that was entirely not worth the $1 https://www.abetterinternet.org/post/replacing-ocsp-with-crls/
LE has no SLA. You have no guarantee to be able to ever renew your certificate again. A risk not anyone should take.
Who is paying for LE? If you're not paying, how can you rely on the service to exist tomorrow?
It's not too long ago that people said "only some sites need HTTPS, HTTP is fine for most". It never was, and people should not build anything relevant on "free" security today either.
https://letsencrypt.org/
The have a lot of sponsors. They are not going anywhere anytime soon.
If you don't like free stuff you really shouldn't be here. Stick with Reddit or whatever other service.
Reddit is free. Other people paying for your free service is a very weak argument to bring up. If Lemmy dies today, nobody but hobbyists and amateurs will care. Just like with LE.
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.