Yeah most all the purchased multi-year certificates are actually just subscriptions to multi-year renewals. There’s a reason that most people are using Let’s Encrypt instead though, because unless you need to sign an application, or use it in a firewall with deep packet inspection, or have higher security on the certificate, then going free with automatic renewals is actually better.
One suggestion would be to run a server with a built-in ACME client like Caddy. As long as you have a DNS A record pointing to your server, it can automatically answer the HTTP challenge and issue the certificate and automatically renew it without any further maintenance.
Click “visit this website”. It just has an expired SSL certificate but it’s fine as long as youre not entering any sensitive information or downloading and running anything from it.
I guess my certs expired. Here’s the comic:
Edit: Updated my certs. Really thought they’d send me a reminder or something…
Every 90 days!
Usually auto-renew kicks in at the 30 day mark unless your card expired.
Soon to be 45.
https://letsencrypt.org/2025/12/02/from-90-to-45
Ah this is what I was misremembering.
I’m a year into a 5 year purchase with name cheap. Their certs last a year by default.
Yeah most all the purchased multi-year certificates are actually just subscriptions to multi-year renewals. There’s a reason that most people are using Let’s Encrypt instead though, because unless you need to sign an application, or use it in a firewall with deep packet inspection, or have higher security on the certificate, then going free with automatic renewals is actually better.
One suggestion would be to run a server with a built-in ACME client like Caddy. As long as you have a DNS A record pointing to your server, it can automatically answer the HTTP challenge and issue the certificate and automatically renew it without any further maintenance.
Click “visit this website”. It just has an expired SSL certificate but it’s fine as long as youre not entering any sensitive information or downloading and running anything from it.