I was asked a curious question the other day related to the number of websites that have SSL certificates installed. After thinking about it, big companies have SSL but most personal websites don’t. Based on my own feelings, the reason things are this way is due to the upfront and yearly costs of SSL certificates as well as not realizing the benefits of encrypting your website content.
During this discussion, a friend told me about the Let’s Encrypt project. This is an exciting new FREE Certificate Authority that will be arriving in the Summer of 2015.
Let’s Encrypt will not be for everyone. There will still be needs for the Extended Validation, wildcard, and multiple –domain certificates that are provided by Certificate Authorities such as VeriSign and GoDaddy to name a few.
The current application only supports apache but IIS is in the works. A small piece of management software is installed on the server that handles everything from proving control of the website, to requesting the certificate and installing it on the site. It also tracks certificate expiration dates ,handles auto renewal of the certificate and provides the ability to revoke the certificate if needed.
Since there is not a Windows/IIS version currently available, I do not have hands on experience with it. I am definitely looking forward to taking it for a test drive once it is available to see how it handles multiple websites on the same machine, host header sites, or even servers that have SNI and CCS installed.
Terri is a Microsoft MVP (ASP .NET/IIS), an MCSA: Windows Server 2012, and a Cloud Administrator at OrcsWeb, a hosted server company providing managed hosting solutions
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