I’ve been using the free StartSSL service for my SSL certs for a few years now. A colleague recently reminded me of a newer service that aims to make the process of obtaining and renewing a certificate much easier. I don’t have time right now to write a big post about how to set up your web server to use SSL, but if you haven’t done it before, or generally used encryption keys before, there’s a lot of lingo to learn before you can really dive in. In addition, many tutorials have “their way” of doing it, which leaves out the idea that it isn’t the “only way”. When you go to those other tutorials, you are left thinking “Wait, but I thought I needed to…”

The newer service, Let’s Encrypt claims to take a lot of the manual work out of the process, and helps you setup and maintain SSL certs using a package. I haven’t tested it yet, but I want to check it out – hence I’m dropping this post here.