Hi,
I have 10 years of experience in IT industry, located in NZ.
Currently I am working on automation, designing and implementation of AWS infrastructure using Cloudformation, AutoScaling, VPC, S3, ELB, Cloudfront, RDS, SES, SNS and other AWS services. Plus I have good hands on Configuration Management tools like Puppet / Chef which helps in automation of your application stack.
I have great experience in Linux System Administration and can set up SSL without a hitch.
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Whether you get your certificate signed by a certificate authority (Verisign/GoDaddy etc.) or sign it yourself (generate on your own), there is one thing that is exactly the same on both.
Both certificates will generate a site that cannot be read by third-parties. The data sent over an https connection or SSL, will be encrypted regardless of whether the certificate is signed or self-signed.
Then Why should you buy a certificate rather than generating my own?
A certificate authority (Verisign) tells your customers that this server information has been verified by a trusted source.
You can use self signed certificates for test or development environements. It is recommend to use Signed certificates for production environments.
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Thanks,
Abhishek