Self-signed SSL Cert or CA?
I would like to have the authentication and registration parts of my website encrypted (for obvious reason).  This site is currently and older site which some friends and I started in middle school and still use today.  I may or may not register it to be a Non-Profit Organization in the near future, but either way, a CA costs money and the organization doesn't have any and we are currently college kids.

Verisign is unreasonable and GoDaddy is $30/year.  GoDaddy isn't too unreasonable, and I think their certs are accepted by most web browsers. The thing with GoDaddy is that I don't know why they have different SSL products (i.e.: why is it cheap to not verify me?  does this have any implications on the cert and how the browser treats it if it just contains a domain name?)

Also, is there an issue with using my own cert?  Could the login page be http, and have a line stating that I use a self-signed cert and here is it's fingerprint and then post the form to an https page?  Safari's method isn't too bad or sound too scary.  I'm afraid, however, that firefox 3's method will scare people away and give me a tonne of emails saying that my site is being hacked or something. I don't know how IE responds to self-signed certs. (There is also the issue of why pay for something I can create myself with no effort, but I'm not going to pose the philosophical part of it, this is a more practical question.)

In sum, do I give GoDaddy $30 a year or do I just tell people in a small paragraph what I'm doing and give the few people that will actually want my fingerprint it?
Self-signed SSL Cert or CA?
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I would like to have the authentication and registration parts of my website encrypted (for obvious reason).  This site is currently and older site which some friends and I started in middle school and still use today.  I may or may not register it to be a Non-Profit Organization in the near future, but either way, a CA costs money and the organization doesn't have any and we are currently college kids.

Verisign is unreasonable and GoDaddy is $30/year.  GoDaddy isn't too unreasonable, and I think their certs are accepted by most web browsers. The thing with GoDaddy is that I don't know why they have different SSL products (i.e.: why is it cheap to not verify me?  does this have any implications on the cert and how the browser treats it if it just contains a domain name?)

Also, is there an issue with using my own cert?  Could the login page be http, and have a line stating that I use a self-signed cert and here is it's fingerprint and then post the form to an https page?  Safari's method isn't too bad or sound too scary.  I'm afraid, however, that firefox 3's method will scare people away and give me a tonne of emails saying that my site is being hacked or something. I don't know how IE responds to self-signed certs. (There is also the issue of why pay for something I can create myself with no effort, but I'm not going to pose the philosophical part of it, this is a more practical question.)

In sum, do I give GoDaddy $30 a year or do I just tell people in a small paragraph what I'm doing and give the few people that will actually want my fingerprint it?