That’s right the SSL Certificate market is about to change, this is a really exciting time. As I have stated before putting a SSL on your website is one of the most important things you can do and soon this could be available to everyone for free.
We have been watching this very closely and letsencrypt.org have now made SSL certificates available to anyone with a domain name for free, below are the key points:-
- Free: Anyone who owns a domain name can use Let’s Encrypt to obtain a trusted certificate at zero cost.
- Automatic: Software running on a web server can interact with Let’s Encrypt to painlessly obtain a certificate, securely configure it for use, and automatically take care of renewal.
- Secure: Let’s Encrypt will serve as a platform for advancing TLS security best practices, both on the CA side and by helping site operators properly secure their servers.
- Transparent: All certificates issued or revoked will be publicly recorded and available for anyone to inspect.
- Open: The automatic issuance and renewal protocol will be published as an open standard that others can adopt.
- Cooperative: Much like the underlying Internet protocols themselves, Let’s Encrypt is a joint effort to benefit the community, beyond the control of any one organization.
With a normal certificate you purchase it and it last for a minimum of a year, however these will last for approximately 60 days and keep renewing and its all automated so the day has come where you don’t need to think about renewals. The certificates seem to be reliable across a wide range of browsers, but as time passes we will have more information on this point.
As you can imagine the market is buzzing with the news of this being live and ready for everyone to adopt. We cannot currently quote when or if this will be available on the cloud hosting as these servers are not run by us, and its dependant on if this will be given for free or not by the data centre.
What we do know is cPanel are now looking at integration of a fully automated feature to install Let’s Encrypt certificates on the server. This means that as a customer you can just go to your account and click order and the sever does the rest, this is a country mile away from the current process and is so simple.
We have been looking at third party options that can plug into cPanel but we fear when cPanel releases their version we could have issues, so we are sitting on the fence with this at the moment.
During this time we will be looking at which packages will have this option (possibly all) but for now we need to wait for cPanel to build this in. Currently they are looking at version 59 release point. currently most servers are on 54.
Taking this onto account an approximate time frame based on current releases would be 12 to 16 weeks.
So this really is exciting and it certainly doesn’t get cheaper than free, well done letsencrypt.org Internet Security Research Group (“ISRG”) for making the internet a safer place.
