Hello
Which certificate should i buy? or can i use a self signed certificate?
If anyone can recommend a cheap one, i will be glad.
Thanks in advance.
Best regards
Skov 10
If you've only got a handful of users, *and* you know them (or, more important, they know you) personally *and* they're fairly tech-savvy *and* you're not protecting any really valuable information then maybe you can get away with self-signed, but it looks pretty unprofessional to use them for any serious purpose beyond testing.
On a practical level, browsers vary in how they react to self-signed certificates. Safari is pretty relaxed about it - it just gives an information alert that you can click through, but Chrome and Firefox do their level best to put users off visiting a self-signed site (the latest version of Chrome is even more paranoid than before).
As a matter of principle, though, even if someone mounting a spoofing, typosquatting or man-in-the-middle attack against your little server seems unlikely, users who don't really understand the implications should steer clear of self-signed sites, and encouraging them to do otherwise is bad practice.
(The certificate system is rather imperfect, but its the only user-friendly solution we have - sadly its no use encrypting a message from A to B unless you have some way of verifying that B is really B...)
There are some places offering free SSL certificates: e.g.
https://www.startssl.com - although I haven't used them myself, and you should check that their terms and conditions cover your use.
The alternative is to install your self-signed certificate on each computer that will be accessing your server (haven't tried this - you'll have to google for how to do it). For maximum security pedant points copy the certificate to each machine using physical media. If you only have a handful of users and you can get physical access yo their machines this might work. However, in the modern environment when every user will want to access your server from their Mac, iPhone, secind iPhone, iPad, iWatch, TV, car and smart fridge it might not be practical.
