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?
Certain unnamed companies coughgoogle doesn’t like to trust Let Encrypt its definitely not an abuse of an illegal monopoly they have good reasons I promise.
But the whole point behind using a signed certificate is that other people can look at you and immediately know you are who you say you are if a company doesn’t trust you it doesn’t really matter what the motivation is you might as well use a self signed certificate.
Paid certificates have the money to make sure everyone trusts them and has a reputation to maintain so are more likely to defend a legitimate complaint.
99.999% of individuals it simply doesn’t matter(although you might have to look into it if you’re using android apps) but to a company the little bit that certification costs is worth every penny.