I will admit that I have not read the documentation and that left me in the situation I am in. I was testing the provisioning of a server that requested and got a certificate. Unfortunately it appears that too many certificates have been issued against this hostname now. I didn’t know about the --test-cert toggle either otherwise I’d have used that.
So the question is…Is there a way for me to remove the certificates instead of me changing the hostname of the machine and having LE sign more certs than are needed?
As @cool110 said, there’s no way to reset the counter–even if you revoked one or more of the certificates (which you could do, but I wouldn’t recommend), it’s going to be 7 days before you can issue another one. But is something preventing you from using one of the certs you’ve already obtained?
They got destroyed along with the VPS when I did an OS reinstall. I was working on automating the deployments which included the certificate registration. I never actually kept the original certs.
Just wait for 7 days, and you will be able to issue certificate again. Also, if you have private key, you can find your certificate from https://crt.sh
Yep, that would make it tough. You could still get the certificates by searching at http://crt.sh, but without the private keys they’re worthless. Also without the private keys, you couldn’t revoke them even if it would help you.