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?
With paid certificates you can target ancient and unsupported operating systems like windows XP and android 2, letsencrypt is relatively recent and it’s not present in the root certificates of those systems
It actually seems more like a windows 10 compatibility dilemma for developers. You can support older systems but it would require some effort. The problem is not the absence of some specific certificates, but the absence of newer ciphers altogether.
This does give security but also removes backwards compatibility with some clients that might be important for some websites.
At some point it’s good to let things die