I think it’s a good idea, everyone should be automating this anyway.
Those emails have warned me something was pooched in advance many times. I do find them useful.
Sad to see them go, but nice they mention an alternative.
Pretty much all monitoring solutions on the market track cert expiration nowadays. I get an alert when any of my certs have <5 days left
I’ve mainly gotten false positives, myself. When I’ve added another subdomain or something and the certificate gets set up differently, so then you get 2-3 emails saying domain X will expire, but if you connect to the url you see it has 80+ days left. Setting up your own monitoring solution is probably long overdue for myself, and it’s nice I’m getting forced to do it, in a way
Providing expiration notifications costs Let’s Encrypt tens of thousands of dollars per year
Not doubting them, but I don’t understand how that’s possible.
Storing the email addresses and expiration dates takes an irrelevant amount of storage space, even if they had billions of cutomers.
Sending the emails should also not cost thousands, even if a significant amount of customers regularly let their certificates expire (which hopefull isn’t the case).
So where are the tens of thousands of yearly costs coming from?
As with all things email, they probably really wanted to make sure that the mails were delivered and thus were using a commercial MTA to ensure that.
I’d wager, even at 20 or 30 or 40k a year, that’s way less than it’d cost to host infra and have at least two if not three engineers available 24/7 to maintain critical infra.
Looking at my mail, over the years I’ve gotten a couple hundred email from them around certificates and expirations (and other things), and if you assume there’s a couple million sites using these certs, I could easily see how you’d end up in a situation where this could scale in cost very very slowly, until it’s suddenly a major drain.
If they send 2 emails per subdomain per year, that could easily be 10s of millions which would make the cost per email measured in thousandths of a cent. And I could see the number of subdomains being larger by a factor of 10, maybe more.
Another angle: someone with IT experience needs to manage the system that seems emails, and other engineers need to integrate other systems with the email reminder system. The time spent on engineering could easily add up to thousands per year, if not tens of thousands.
I’m guessing their figure is based on both running costs and engineering costs.
According to their stats page, Let’s Encrypt’s certificates are used by around 500M domains.
Dietpi has an automatic letsencrypt recert service which could probably be ported since its just a whiptail script
I just wish I wouldn’t have to renew certs so often.
You’re not supposed to do it manually.
Tell that to all the embedded device manufacturers… switches, appliances, nas, etc.
There’s a whole load of things that will have a massive administrative burden if the frequency is dropped.
Skill issue.
PSA: If you use Cloudflare to proxy, you can get a free decade long certificate and not worry about it for awhile.
Oh, look: the NSA dangling a carrot on a line.
Hey, if you wanna put your home server out there so the first person who gets pissy at you can DDoS you off the net until your ISP decides to cancel your service, that’s a perfectly acceptable decision to make for yourself.
