Hello,

Previously, we used SmartCom’s SSL certificates, however now we have moved to Let’s Encrypt. I did this for a number of reasons;

• Ease of use. Previously I would have to update the sites SSL certificates automatically. Hopefully now, through the use of certbot, I should no longer have to do that, if it works.
• The certificates are installed automatically. Unlike Smartcom, this is laborious and takes a long time as I have to do it so often.

Now that the task is automated, I hopefully should not have to do it anymore, which was Let’s Encrypt’s intention. In addition to being easy to do, they also have a lot of support and community forums that make it much easier to get things done, previously, I had no experience installing SSL certificates on Apache and the process took me a good few days to understand, having the process not only automated but also easy to follow, made it much easier to do. It also allowed me to check my certificates on SSLlabs and still receive an A.

Their emphasis on being free, open and automated made them the ideal choice for me and I will be porting all of my applications to this authority. As with this website, keeping it up is my top priority, keeping it active… not so much. I am also working on ChatBox, so I will have an update as and when I have finished working on that for this year, I am very happy with the progress this summer holiday has allowed me to take up and I have decided that soon I will be refreshing all of my server instances to give them a fresh start, so there will likely be an update on that too.

Thanks, Let’s Encrypt! You Rock.

If you read this and would like more updates on the status of the website, be sure to comment.