Free certificate courses : Having become a necessity in web hosting, SSL security certificates encrypt the connection between a server and the user who visits a website, protecting the data of the site and its users from being intercepted and sold to third parties or other illegal activities.
Also, browsers display as ” Not secure” those sites that do not have encryption, so their use enhances the trust of visitors to a site, to proceed with registration, purchases, etc. At the same time SSL has become an important factor SEO for ranking a site in search results.
🙂 Recent big downtime Let’s Encrypt Free certificate courses ✅
The recent expiration of the parent certificate (IdentTrust DST Root CA X3, which expired on 30/9/2021) of the free Let’s Encrypt , has caused and continues to cause malfunctions and prolonged downtime and major financial losses on many thousands of websites .
These include large companies and hosting providers such as Palo Alto, Cisco, Guardian Firewall , Monday.com , Google Cloud Platform , Microsoft Azure, OVH , Shopify , Xero, QuickBooks, Fortinet , Heroku, cPanel , Cloudflare Pages , Sophos , AWS , Digital Ocean et al. but also thousands of website owners and e-shops around the world.
🤑 And the question is: is it worth a few Euros a year to risk losing sales, customers and your credibility? 🤓
At DNHOST we say no, since we have always used and favored the use of branded SSL over free. After the above incident, the number of users who have turned to commercial SSL has increased significantly and they no longer risk the operation of their business for a cheap amount per year.
So in this article, we will show you the pros of free SSL and the disadvantages of free SSL and the pros of commercial SSL and we believe that things are quite clear.
Disadvantages of Free SSL
Lack of support
Free SSL is not directly supported.
As the name implies, free SSLs, unlike branded ones, do not contain any purchase value to support their operation. When any problem arises, the organization that issues them will not immediately or at all support the reopening of your site.
This can cause your site to appear ” Unsafe ” in all browsers or stop working completely , until the publisher or hosting provider detects and fixes the problem.
For example, in the recent downtime mentioned above, the only thing LE can do in terms of support is to…. urges LetsEncrypt users to look for a solution in its community forum !!!
💥 Lets Encrypt free SSL Free certificate courses 🔥
Short duration of validity
All free SSLs are valid for 30-90 days and every 1 to 3 months you must re-issue and install your SSL on the server that hosts your website. This process will cost you valuable time and possibly a problem in the operation of your SSL if you forget to reissue it. Fortunately, branded SSLs are reissued every 13 months and you can rest assured that during this time, the data circulating on your site is encrypted.
They only certify the Domain
Free SSL has the disadvantage that they only validate the domain validation of the administrator (domain validation). They do not offer any service of validation of the registered office, the name, the physical existence and the legality of the natural or legal person who owns the domain name and the website, as offered by the branded OV or EV security certificates. As a result, many users will feel that they are in an unsafe or even suspicious environment, especially if your site uses personal data submission forms, as they will not be able to be sure of the existence of your business or organization.