Seems to good to be true?

Well maybe not.

Not if you consider who is giving away the Free Certificates.

Lets Encrypt is a SSL Certificate Authority run by the EFF. If you’re not familiar with the EFF or the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They are a non profit organization defending digital civil liberties. The EFF are promoting Lets Encrypt in order to get everyday people, blog owners and the like to encrypt everything they do online and promote security awareness around our digital lives.

The largest obstacle in their eyes is the cost of owning an SSL Certificate and the cost of managing said Certificate(s). Just looking locally here in Australia, I can pay from anywhere upwards of $70 AUD per year, per site. So if you wanted to protect both your mail server and your web server that’s $140!

That $140 a year adds up just to protect your blog that you don’t update, so almost no-one does it… well now you have no excuse not to!

Lets Encrypt have a Digital Certificate Authority that automates creating, updating, and managing your digital certificates for FREE. All you have to do is prove that you own the domain and they will provide you with a digital certificate for that domain. Which is pretty much how most low end digital certificates get provided by most CAs anyway. For securing your blog, these certificates are more than adequate. You’ll need to read through the site and follow the instructions provided within for further details.

I highly recommend that you check out the link above and do the same.

Just a note, the Certificates they provide are only valid for 90 days, so if you don’t use a cron job or something similar with their automated tool to renew the certificates you will have to do this manually.

Happy secure browsing!