A few days ago I moved longren.io to https. I didn’t pay for a certificate though like I would when setting up an e-commerce site or something else important.
I even get the little green lock symbol in the address bar, but I think this is mostly due to my use of Cloudflare.
TinyCert is a service I discovered that lets you be your own PKI/certificate authority. It’s entirely free and provides you with a very nice interface for managing your certificates. The image below shows the interface for managing your certificates. The list on the right is a list of certificates, as you can see I’ve got one made up for longrendev.io, but haven’t put it in place quite yet.
The support from TinyCert is very good as well, I had a few questions regarding how their certificates would work with Cloudflare and they quickly cleared my questions up. SSL Labs from Qualys gives the SSL certificate an “A” rating. Should you use certificates from TinyCert in production? Probably not. I am, however, due to my use of Cloudflare.
This post isn’t meant to show you how to install certificates or use TinyCert, it’s simply to make you aware of the tool and what can be done with it. TinyCert has a pretty extensive FAQ, so should you have questions, which I’m sure you do, head on over and start reading. If you do need help installing the certificates from TinyCert, their help center does a nice job of providing instructions for Apache and Nginx based setups.
Have fun with TinyCert, it’s a pretty awesome service that I’ll continue to use and will absolutely be donating to. But please remember, TinyCert certificates should not be used for regular public websites and the service is not a substitute for a proper certification authority, but for self-signed certificates.
Well, now what?
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