From the course: SSL Certificates for Web Developers

Free certificates with Let's Encrypt

From the course: SSL Certificates for Web Developers

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Free certificates with Let's Encrypt

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- [Instructor] In the previous movie, we learned about certificate authorities and we saw a list of CAs where you can purchase an SSL certificate. In this movie, we will focus on another certificate authority called Let's Encrypt, which offers SSL certificates for free. Let's Encrypt is just another certificate authority like the others, but it is a project of the Internet Security Research Group, which is a nonprofit that's supported by many large technology companies. The Let's Encrypt project launched in 2015 at a time when less than 40% of webpages were sent over HTTPS. The project goal is for all web servers to use HTTPS all the time. You can learn more about them from their website, which is https://letsencrypt.org. To promote the adoption of HTTPS, Let's Encrypt has work to remove the obstacles to getting an SSL certificate. First, they offered their certificates for free. When the project began, CAs were charging hundreds of dollars per year for an SSL certificate, and many still do. Offering certificates for free removed a huge barrier to their adoption. Second, Let's Encrypt created a website and software tools to simplify the setup and maintenance of SSL certificates. We'll use these later on when we learn how to obtain and set up a certificate. The project has been a huge success. After the first 10 years, Let's Encrypt had over 550 million certificates in use, and the numbers keep growing. If you visit the Let's Encrypt website and you click on About Us, you'll find the Statistics page, that's the page that I'm on now, and you can see the growth of Let's Encrypt certificates over time. So you can see, we start at the beginning and they had zero, and now they're way up here, over 500 million certificates. You can scroll further down and it'll show you the percentage of web pages loaded by Firefox that are using HTTPS. And you can see how that number went from being way down here in 2014 at 26%, and you can see how it's climbed way up here into the eighties and nineties, depending on which metric you're looking at. And then there's another one that shows how many certificates they're issuing per day, and you can see that they're regularly putting out over 6 million new certificates each day. It's impressive. These free SSL certificates work just like the paid versions do. They still certify the owner of a public key. However, there are some small differences. They do not offer all types of certificates. We'll talk more about certificate types later in this chapter. Some of those types are just ways to bundle and save money when purchasing your certificate. That doesn't matter as much when all the certificates are free from the start. And the SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt are valid for 90 days and then they expire. Whereas certificates from the paid certificate authorities typically last for a year or more before they expire. That's not actually as big a difference as it may seem though because Let's Encrypt makes it easy to automatically renew them . So you can set it up, for example, to automatically renew in the background every 30 or 60 days. So Let's Encrypt offers a great opportunity to get free SSL certificates that are easy to set up. We'll learn how to set them up in the next chapter.

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