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Let's Encrypt Takes Free “Wildcard” Certificates Live

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday March 14 2018, @02:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the simple-cypers dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Arstechnica reports

In July of 2017, the nonprofit certificate authority Let's Encrypt promised to deliver something that would put secure websites and Web applications within reach of any Internet user: free "wildcard" certificates to enable secure HTTP connections for entire domains. Today, Let's Encrypt took that promised service live, in addition to a new version of the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol, an interface that can be used by a variety of client software packages to automate verification of certificate requests.

[....]Many hosting providers already support the registration of Let's Encrypt certificates to varying degrees. But Let's Encrypt's free certificate offering hasn't been snapped up by some larger hosting providers—such as GoDaddy—who also sell SSL certificates to their customers.

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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday March 14 2018, @07:12PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday March 14 2018, @07:12PM (#652549) Journal

    How many hours of extra work qualify as "a huge PITA" ?

    For me I'd say it was somewhere around 20 (maybe 30?) at a rate of about 5 hours every three months, to get it as fully automated as possible. Usually every time I renew there's some minor issue, but I always manage to fix it in a day after work, so doesn't take all that long. But I think that's probably worse than average -- I'm registering certs for domains that aren't even accessible outside my network, so I have to put in extra effort to get LE to successfully validate those domains. And since it's designed to be automated, it's faster every time you do it as you work out the issues in your automation scripts and as bugs get patched in certbot and other related utilities, so the "cost" will fall over time. If they'd had wildcard certs from the start it probably would have been much faster for me too.

    A basic wildcard cert starts around $150/year, or $15/year/domain, and that would not be entirely pain-free either. I wouldn't say that LE is *always* better than the commercial certs, but I think it's definitely competitive, and can offer significant savings in the right circumstances.

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