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Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

Looks neat, but it's prohibitively expensive to use for a personal website which doesn't generate revenue. I use CloudFlare (at $5/mo), but close to $17/mo for this service dwarfs my hosting + CDN fees together. I'd love to see a free or low-cost service that just checks SSL cert expiration and sends me an email 30 days before it expires. Would be great for making sure my personal website isn't broken without breaking the bank.

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https://secure.expirify.com is a free option that works well. I believe I discovered it on HN.

Doesn't your SSL provider send you said mail ?

Yes, but that's based on their information, it's not "monitoring". Monitoring is an external system not influenced by the others which observes and reports. It'd be nice to be able to monitor this, although for my personal website its not absolutely critical. Do you think your SSL provider is infallible?

You mean, like https://certificatemonitor.org/?

Just use letsencrypt, it renews automatically

And even if you don’t set that up they still email you when it’s about to expire

Which isn't the same as monitoring if you actually use it. Seen more than enough LE sites where someone configured server reloading wrongly (and in at least one case, a package update overrode their config), which means they have a valid LE cert (and thus no LE notification) but clients get the expired one.

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