Has anyone using SSL2BUY tested the new automatic installation beta? It promises a one-time setup with a secure agent that handles domain validation, certificate installation, and renewal on each cycle, instead of requiring manual work every few months. I'd appreciate feedback on how reliable and secure it is in practice, and whether it offers any real advantages over free automated certificate solutions.
3 Answers
If your setup supports ACME, Let’s Encrypt is usually the obvious first choice. It’s free, renews automatically, and tools such as win-acme make it fairly straightforward on Windows. The main advantage of a paid service would be handling systems that are difficult to automate.
Let’s Encrypt can handle wildcard certificates too, provided you use DNS-01 validation. That means paid automation isn’t necessarily needed even for wildcard use, although the best choice depends on how much effort your particular environment requires.
I’ve used Let’s Encrypt for most systems and kept SSL2BUY for the cases that are harder to automate. The service is inexpensive and has been useful, but shorter certificate lifetimes are pushing everyone toward automation anyway. Once reliable automation is available, it becomes difficult to justify paying for certificates that can be issued and renewed for free.
That’s my concern as well. The beta could still be useful if it works with applications that don’t have a clean ACME integration, but for a standard web server the cost advantage seems to disappear.