Let’s Encrypt: Wildcard certificates are incoming FOR FREE in 2018!

Let’s Encrypt will begin issuing wildcard certificates in January of 2018. Wildcard certificates are a commonly requested feature and we understand that there are some use cases where they make HTTPS deployment easier. Our hope is that offering wildcards will help to accelerate the Web’s progress towards 100% HTTPS.
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A wildcard certificate can secure any number of subdomains of a base domain (e.g. *.example.com). This allows administrators to use a single certificate and key pair for a domain and all of its subdomains, which can make HTTPS deployment significantly easier.

Wildcard certificates will be offered free of charge via our upcoming ACME v2 API endpoint. We will initially only support base domain validation via DNS for wildcard certificates, but may explore additional validation options over time. We encourage people to ask any questions they might have about wildcard certificate support on our community forums.

We decided to announce this exciting development during our summer fundraising campaign because we are a nonprofit that exists thanks to the generous support of the community that uses our services. If you’d like to support a more secure and privacy-respecting Web, donate today!

Read the full announcement here

Let’s Encrypt has been a blessing in disguise for the web. Not even in disguise, now that I rethink this. They provide free HTTPS certificates for everyone, via an automated method. You only need a domain hosted in public, and an email address.

I've been using them since the start on various domains I own, as I don't want to shell out hundreds of euro per year for SSL. I have no ecommerce websites, and even if I had, I would still use Let’s Encrypt. Why?

It's very simple. The only benefit of using paid certificates is that you'll get a compensation in case of a breach. I don't care about that, since they would find 1000 other reasons to not pay you.

• But, this way, scammers can have free certificates too!

Well, scammers make a whole lot of money, and with certificates being so cheap (less than $10 per year for a basic one), it should be a no-brainer that nothing has changed. TLS Certificates (the ones we use today) guarantee that noone is eavesdropping on your traffic to that website, but not that the content of this website is not property of the scammer. About this, you should use common sense. For example, if they offer you an iPhone for $10, without taking part on a contest, it's a scam.

Let’s Encrypt is growing bigger and stronger every day. On June 28th they issued their 100,000,000th certificate.

Are you using Let’s Encrypt? What do you think of their free service?