In short: your website is secure with a free Let's Encrypt certificate (we install this automatically for you). It's secure and only large organizations or specific use cases require a paid certificate nowadays.
Your website receives a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate. Let's Encrypt is simply put a system that generates free and reliable SSL certificates and is globally the most commonly used SSL certificate provider.
You can however also opt for a certificate from a Certificate Authority as offered on our SSL page. There are three types:
- Domain Validation: A certificate comparable that goes through
- Wildcard: secures Your domain and all its subdomains (e.g. example.com and subdomain.example.com)
- Extended Validation: The most extensive certificate that comes with a lot of checks to verify that your company has requested the certificate and not someone else.
The main advantage of these is that an external party verifies that you're the legitimate requester of the certificate.
In the past, your browser would show your company name and a green lock before your domain name if you use an Extended Validation certificate. Nowadays, this practice is gone and for a website on a shared hosting platform you'll be fine with a Let's Encrypt certificate.
As the emphasis is now on whether your website is secure or not, you'll notice that even the world's largest companies nowadays only opt for either a Domain Validation or Wildcard certificate and no longer use Extended Validation certificates. These types of certificates are mostly necessary when your use case doesn't allow for (easy) automatic generation of Let's Encrypt certificates.
