The self-signed certificate is a certificate that you can create yourself that will provide SSL encryption but without the verification of your website from an outside source. The outside verification does cost money. In other words, you can get the protection you need, encryption by doing it yourself.

"Mozilla Firefox 3 limits usable encrypted (SSL) web sites to those who are willing to pay money to one of their approved digital certificate vendors. This policy is bad for the web. Not only does it make users less secure overall by reducing the number of encrypted connections, it damages the basic principle of equality among web participants..."

"... «A weakness has been discovered in the random number generator used by OpenSSL on Debian and Ubuntu systems. As a result of this weakness, certain encryption keys are much more common than they should be, such that an attacker could guess the key through a brute-force attack given minimal knowledge of the system.