You must pay for security certificates from a certificate authority. To reduce costs, you can use a self-signed certificate whenever possible. For example, web pages that do not require credit card information or sensitive data can be handled with a self-signed certificate. When developers are working on a secure website, they can test the site using a self-signed SSL security certificate.

To generate a self-signed certificate, first generate an RSA Private Key with the OpenSSL toolkit. Then create a certificate signing request and generate the certificate.