Free SSL Can Lead to HUGE Headaches

I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the relationship between parties here.

Letsencrypt provides free certificates to anyone who can demonstrate that they host or own a domain. That’s the end of it, really.

Your hosting provider has offered you a service they have built which is based on these free certificates, but either their service doesn’t work properly or they haven’t adequately explained to you how to manage it.

In either case, your gripe is with the hosting company, not with Letsencrypt.

There is not, and never has been, any special relationship between Letsencrypt and your hosting provider.

8 Likes

You've been deeply insulting with your offhand remarks about someone else's language barrier when you're the one who's misunderstood the role LE has in this whole thing, because your hosting company sucks.

Beyond that, there are many LE-enabled hosting providers where you can click a button, and HTTPS is enabled within seconds, basically as long as it takes for LE to confirm the domain. This sad story basically tells me that their entire "process" is that the button probably emails an engineer, who manually logs into your instance and types some commands to pull the cert, install it, and enable HTTPS, and the company has no renewal process at all, because they fundamentally don't understand LE or ACME at all. It's probably taking them so long to catch up because hundreds of hosted accounts expired in the same short time frame and they have no clue how to manage that except by manually renewing and installing each, one at a time. No decent large web host would operate this way.

Did you even try clicking the disable button, waiting a few seconds, and enabling it again, to see if that would reset the state and start a renewal/new request? Or just leaving it disabled until your host can get their butts in gear and fix the problem, rather than continue to experience downtime? Long term you'll want to leave this place in the dust (do you know if they even have backups or redundancy?), but at least that'll get you going for today.

2 Likes

It appears Ion_Saliu paid for a Comodo wildcard SSL:

The price of that certificate and its upkeep may have been greater than the price of a year’s hosting at a web host that fully supports Let’s Encrypt certificates.0

horse, water, old dog, tricks… etc