About the Apache plugin: I have no clue what so ever how it works, because my distro isn’t supported yet. At the moment it’s just Debian based distro’s unfortunately, but there’s code in the works (almost finished I believe) that’ll add a lot of other distro’s, including mine (Gentoo 
).
About the rate limit: I’m afraid you’re right. In the mean time, you could experiment with the staging server. It has less restrictive limits, but doesn’t generate valid certificates. Once you’ve got the CLI syntax right, you just have to save/remember/write it down and wait 
(And test it again after the week, because it’s all beta and all code is subject to change ofcourse 
)