Let’s Encrypt will enter Public Beta on December 3, 2015. Once we’ve entered Public Beta our systems will be open to anyone who would like to request a certificate. There will no longer be a requirement to sign up and wait for an invitation.
See the full post here.
thanks @josh guess without mention of Nov 16th date, it’s implied the public system has been pushed back 
Yeah, we aren’t quite able to make that and the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. pushed us back a few more days as well.
Public is clear, but what does the beta status mean exactly for the users?
I think an an CA it should be made clear what is to be expected and what beta should mean for the users.
From the blog post:
“We have more work to do before we’re comfortable dropping the beta label entirely, particularly on the client experience. Automation is a cornerstone of our strategy, and we need to make sure that the client works smoothly and reliably on a wide range of platforms. We’ll be monitoring feedback from users closely, and making improvements as
quickly as possible.”
The primary reason we kept the beta label is that the client isn’t quite where we want it to be. There are no other limitations.
I’m glad for this initiative but I see it quite a lot oriented on apache because of the automation of renewal.
Did not you consider supporting in friendly way Azure and maybe even become app in the Azure market?
Good news.
Please make the process as real as possible, for example, removing --agree-dev-preview from the command line …
Very good. I will use first certification and it’s free!!!
Since the beta is being pushed out for the clients, can we whitelist all hosts for beta domains and set production level rate limits now?
This will happen on December 3rd.
If you need to upgrade your hosting to try it out, you’re probably on shared hosting. General public (well, specific to your host) will in this case depend on your hosting provider, not LE.
As @kelunik said it depends on your host.
As an example, I’m my own host & as I don’t have anything using HTTPS on production (yet) I’ve been testing on both my UAT & Prod environments as it wouldn’t affect anything & if I had to renew the cert etc as part of the beta then fine - nothing broken & it’s already helped find issues with various java utils (amongst others)/
Hi currently there are around 16.000 certificates issued and there are requested 150.000 which are on the white list.
If the white list fall and on 3 December all domains can request certificates are there any idea how many certs will be requested ?
For example currently i have www and plain domain whielisted. And i plan to fully automate the server
a) Renew the certificate 3 days before they expire
b) Automatically request new certificate for subdomains that does not have an certificate.
I think this can sum up to 20 FQDN’s. What happen if for example strato, 1und1 or other large provider over 1 click
certificate via letsencrypt ?
About how many certs/day was calculated when planing the infrastructure.
The main concern I have, speaking just as a tech guy, is that we ensure our beta testers are able to get through the renewal process before dropping the beta label. Calling it a beta is more a warning that, hey, there may still be some kinks here depending on your deployment situation.
So what was the point of offering people to register and wait for an invitation?
The point is to gather feedback, expose areas where Let’s Encrypt still needs work (software and documentation!), and see how things scale both in terms of system load and stuff like community support.
Without a limited, private beta, the client probably would’ve had huge problems with a lot of common setups, and documentation wouldn’t be of any help. Community support and bug trackers would be overwhelmed. A lot of people would check out the project and abandon ship as soon as they ran into some kind of problem, which might have been caught in the beta. Now all of that happens on a much smaller scale with a group of technically-minded enthusiasts who decided they were willing to give an unfinished product a try and provide helpful feedback.
For the invite-only part of the beta we wanted to ensure we could increase traffic at a controlled rate while we fixed any scaling issues.
I think you misunderstood my question. I signed up and was put on a waiting list. So now that there is a public beta, that effort is moot.
Did you really spend that much time filling out that form? It’s been always clear that it’s a closed beta and probably not everyone getting approved until the end.
Now I understand, thanks for clarifying. What day did you sign up, and for what domains? If it's been a while, I can check and see why you haven't received an invite yet.