In many instances I act as my own CA (Certificate Authority).

Face it. I do not really want to spend £200+ excluding VAT to secure POP3 access for just a year. Include as well the five secured NxFifteen domains and the costs start souring well into the thousands each year for something that at its core is for my own satisfaction. Yet, to secure access, I need to create a SSL certificate, and it need to be signed by someone. Now I could easily generate a self-signed certificate to get around this, but its far from perfect, fact its a terrible solution.

So creating a Certification Authority was the only solution, and now I can create, update, and sign my own certificates. Now with no limit on the number of certificates I can issue (for my own uses, I am not offering these to others! Lets just be clear about that point before we go much further) or services I can now secure there is almost no reason any of the traffic I sent my servers should be unencrypted.

This has distinct advantages. Almost every services can take advantage of SSL. Services such as HTTP, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP are just some of the most popular examples. Which is fantastic for anyone looking to protect their services… just like me.