this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
105 points (97.3% liked)

Selfhosted

40677 readers
365 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:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. 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.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

you can automate the process (e.g. with nginx).

How does nginx automate that?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There's a certbot addon which uses nginx directly to renew the certificate (so you don't need to stop the web server to renew). If you install the addon you just use the same certbot commands but with --nginx instead and it will perform the actions without interfering with web server operation.

You just then make sure the cron job to renew also includes --nginx and you're done.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Oh, that.. I think i'm using it but it seems.to expect a response from 80 when all I have there is a redirect to 443.

I thought you meant an nginx plugin.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I have auto redirect to 443. But --nginx works fine. I think it overrides stuff for whatever the specific url used is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Yes you need both 80 and 443 for certbot to work. Anyway having 80 to redirect to 443 is common and not a security risk.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I meant certbot with nginx plugin and http-01 challenge.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

The person isn’t talking about automating being difficult for a hosted website. They’re talking about a third party system that doesn’t give you an easy way to automate, just a web gui for uploading a cert. For example, our WAP interface or our on-premise ERP don’t offer a way to automate. Sure, we could probably create code to automate it and run the risk it breaks after a vendor update. It’s easier to pay for a 12 month cert and do it manually.