Increase Rate Limit

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1

Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. Note: you must provide your domain name to get help. Domain names for issued certificates are all made public in Certificate Transparency logs (e.g. crt.sh | example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.

My domain is: www.drwho-online.co.uk

I ran this command: Request Certificate

It produced this output:

2026-02-15 11:40:01.810 +00:00 [INF] Beginning certificate request process: www.drwho-online.co.uk using ACME provider Anvil
2026-02-15 11:40:01.810 +00:00 [INF] The selected Certificate Authority is: Let's Encrypt
2026-02-15 11:40:01.810 +00:00 [INF] Requested identifiers to include on certificate: drwho-online.co.uk;www.drwho-online.co.uk
2026-02-15 11:40:02.695 +00:00 [WRN] Fail to load resource from 'https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/acme/new-order'.
urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rateLimited: too many certificates (5) already issued for this exact set of identifiers in the last 168h0m0s, retry after 2026-02-16 05:42:19 UTC: see Rate Limits - Let's Encrypt
2026-02-15 11:40:02.695 +00:00 [WRN] Encountered a rate limit while communicating with the ACME API
2026-02-15 11:40:02.695 +00:00 [ERR] urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rateLimited :: too many certificates (5) already issued for this exact set of identifiers in the last 168h0m0s, retry after 2026-02-16 05:42:19 UTC: see Rate Limits - Let's Encrypt

My web server is (include version): IIS

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): Microsoft Windows 2008 Server 2008 R2

My hosting provider, if applicable, is:

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don't know):

I'm using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel): IIS

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you're using Certbot):

2

Please review the Rate Limits - Let's Encrypt documentation carefully and completely.

3 Likes
3

I have - Im asking if our rate limit can be increased due to a recent server issue we had. It has maxed out our 24hr attempts.

4

Apparently not good enough, because the documentation is pretty clear:

We do not offer overrides for this limit.

1 Like
5

Rate limits take several weeks to be approved, it's faster to just wait out the the rate limit for transient server issues.

6

The "New Certificates per Registered Domain" rate limit override is not meant for people running into the "New Certificates per Exact Set of Identifiers" rate limit!

4 Likes
7

You can potentially request a certificate with a different set of names to avoid that limit, however it would be advantageous to debug why you hit that rate limit in the first place. You can use the staging servers for that.

The real question is: What happened to the certificates that were already issued that led to reaching the rate limit and why can't you use one of them?

5 Likes