For us the free doesn't matter because certificates are cheap. It's the byzantine and insecure process of obtaining a cert (sending us our private cert in a zip in a plain text mail. I mean, really?) that makes LE so great.
Edit: Total brainfart, apologies; The company sending us private info as a zip was a different thing.
Your CA should not be in a position to send you your private key. They don't need it in order to sign your certificate. Pretty much every CA I'm aware of allows you to provide your own CSR (which only includes your public key).
Sending the certificate (as opposed to the private key) via email is fine, since that only includes your public key, which is visible to every site visitor anyway.
(I agree that an automated process based on an open, standardized specification is preferable.)
Agreed a thousand percent, but there are services that offer easy installs onto cloud providers that do know your private key - that's how they get it onto your ELB or Heroku.
If you can restrict the service to a subdomain, there are alternatives like the SAN extension that allow those third parties to avoid handling your private key at a small extra cost.
I'm having trouble understanding your comment. SANs are mandatory (current browsers don't even use CNs), how would SANs specifically prevent this? The endpoint where your terminating your traffic obviously must have the private key to decrypt it.
You need one cert (or at least only a handful of certs)—SAN entries do not need to be subdomains of the CN. Greatly reduces headache of ssl-terminating for e.g. client domains.
No there were not. Free options meant untrusted certificates or short-lived certificates that could not be renewed.
LE made SSL free, trusted and long-term. You could have made it twice as hard to do the initial setup and people would have jumped at the opportunity regardless.
StartSSL and WoSign have been offering free, publicly trusted certificates with one year lifetimes (and the ability to renew for free) for quite some time.
The former doesn't allow commercial usage, while the latter operates in China. That's probably why it wasn't an option for a lot of people. (That, and the terrible UX at least in StartSSL's case.)
StartSSL generally don't mention their terms, so a lot of the use of 'StartSSL Free' is commercial. People don't like to hear they've been misled (and shoot the messenger).
They actually started policing this and refuse to renew a certificate if they decide it's a commercial use. Happened to me and rather than argue with them (it wasn't), I bought a $5 one at ssls.com...
While I agree LetsEncrypt is awesome, the certificates are actually shorter-lived (90 days), I believe, than the former CAs that issued certs for free (e.g. StartSSL) that offered a year of validity. The rationale is replacing the keys sooner since you can easily do it automatically with LE.
I used to use Wossl and StartSSL before for lots of little personal projects. I recently switched everything over to LE. I am looking forward to switching other projects to it too, such as ones for clients where we had to pay for wildcard certs in the past. Not having to mark the calendar to renew certs every year is going to be really nice.
Incidentally, does anyone have a good way to integrate LE with EC2's load balancers?
