eric_trackjs

I'm working on https://www.certkit.io. It started as a solution to handle TLS certificate automation for my other SaaS products, but we realized other people who run on-prem workloads might get something out of it.

It uses Let's Encrypt by default. We use delegated DNS to handle ACME challenge validation (we run the DNS, you just CNAME to us). This means you don't need to give us DNS credentials or anything. And for HA workloads it's great, because there's a central clearinghouse for certificates - so all the machines in your web farm (or whatever) get the same cert, but you don't run in to rate limits with LE.

We're recovering Windows Server guys so we made sure our automation works for painful windows workloads like IIS, Exchange etc. too.

We've had enough interest that we're building it out for real. Just left beta last month.

crt.sh is a wonderful tool. I applaud anyone who makes CT log searching more available!

That said, crt.sh can be woefully unreliable. It often returns errors during a query or is just hard down. Large result sets may never return. Queries often take a very long time.

I wanted a more reliable CT log search tool for something I'm working on, so I built a purpose built CT log search tool. I ingest all the data from the logs directly and store in Clickhouse.

https://www.certkit.io/tools/ct-logs/

Yep, I didn't even think about the suspicious angle when I did it. Mostly I was fiddling with how to draw box plots in D3 and that's what came out. Next time I will ensure a 0 axis!

Agreed. Next time I'll make the text and other things a little larger too (the real graphs are actually quite large, I had to shrink them to fit the article formatting.) I'd already spent so much time on the article I didn't want to go back and redo the graphs (I didn't really think too many people would read it - it was a big surprise to see it on HN)

Author here. I am seeing a lot of comments about how the graphs are not anchored at 0. The intent with the graphs was not to "lie" or "mislead" but to fit the data in a way that was mostly readable side by side.

The goal was to show the high level change, in a glanceable way, not to get in to individual millisecond comparisons. However, in the future I would pick a different visualization I think :)

The benchmarking has also come under fire. My goal was to just to put the same site/assets on three different continents and retrieve them a bunch of times. No more, no less. I think the results are still interesting, personally. Clean room benchmarks are cool, but so are real world tests, imo.

Finally, there was no agenda with this post to push HTTP/3 over HTTP/2. I was actually skeptical that HTTP/3 made any kind of difference based on my experience with 1.1 to 2. I expected to write a post about "HTTP/3 is not any better than HTTP/2" and was frankly surprised that it was so much faster in my tests.

Author here. If I were to do it again I would pick a different visualization. The intent was not to "lie" with statistics as other commenters here seem to think, it was to fit the data side by side and have it be reasonably visible.

Lots of room for improvement next time I think.

Off-topic but I'd never heard of CatchJS before. As the founder of TrackJS[1] I can't help but feel they were heavily inspired by our product... almost too inspired considering their logo and marketing copy.

(We've been around since 2014, so we pre-date them by 4 years)

[1] https://trackjs.com

We are building a new SaaS product from scratch and blogging about each step. We are also filming it and putting it on YouTube so people can see how the sausage is made.

It's hosted on Github Pages so hopefully it's available:

https://requestmetrics.com/