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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

"Let’s Encrypt is currently used by more than 280 million websites, issuing between two and three million certificates per day. I often think about how we got here, looking for some nugget of wisdom that might be useful to others."

I guess it's keep trying. Keep patiently explaining, educating and building.

I remember people saying "You'll never be able to topple the certs racket" - and here we are... in a age where every day I read about how we'll 'never' be able to break the big-tech stranglehold and build a distributed network owned by the people, 'never' have privacy and real end-to-end encryption because 'nobody cares', 'never' have practical p2p digital currencies of our own, and where we'll never have open, verifiable hardware. Keep believing.

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Let's Encrypt was the reason I moved 8 websites to self-hosted nginx servers, because my old hoster wanted 10 Euros a month (!) per SSL certificate, despite charging a lot for that slow apache webspace already.

Even ignoring the money moving away from there was worth it. There is so much more control over my software on my own instances. I can do actual backups for free. Of course it is more work and needs more attention, but not a lot more

What alternatives are there to get cheap easy SSL certificates?

Let's Encrypt has no competition because Let's Encrypt needs no competition: it works, it's cheap, and competitors can't really provide any advantages for its target audience (mostly people who just want a cert).

ZeroSSL appears to have the advantage of fewer rate limitations if that's an issue. Haven't used it a ton myself though.

The major cloud providers have options for free certs: Amazon and Google run CAs, and Azure has an option for free certs from Digicert. Amazon and Azure both work with their services. Google just announced they’re supporting the same ACME protocol that Lets Encrypt uses too!

It is somewhat important for Let’s Encrypt to have competition: For reliability it is good to have alternatives with no shared infrastructure. If Let’s Encrypt ever becomes untrustworthy (and as a LE employee, I hope that never happens!) there must be alternatives so the root programs have the option to remove the Let’s Encrypt root. And there’s many geopolitical concerns too.

It’s not even a competition. Every customer increases costs to provide the service. More people handling the load of signing keys means less cost for a public service. It’s a shared ecosystem of trust. Yes, you can make the argument that too many CAs is untrustworthy, I would agree. But there is a reliability and availability argument, both security objectives, to having alternatives. There is probably an optimal point between redundancy and too many cooks.

> Let's Encrypt has no competition because Let's Encrypt needs no competition

I love Let's Encrypt! Truly good work for the benefit of humanity.

Still. Everything needs competition. Any single organization amassing too much influence is always a bad thing, no matter how benevolent the organization.

Some people care in the intelligence community ;) It's better to have LetsEncrypt and CloudFlare in the loop to protect national interests and fight against maliciouses actors.

I'm really pleased to see someone else framing this as a national security issue. It's a point of view rarely heard.

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