This week marks the expiration of my last paid for SSL certificates and moving all certificates to Lets Encrypt. In the process I had a chance to moving some of my smaller personal and hobby sites as well as moving my wildcard cert for the main site. In this post I'll describe the process I'll describe what tools I used and the process I went through to gradually move my sites over to Lets Encrypt.

The pressure is on: HTTPS is pushed front and center more and more as we see the browser vendors and API tools providers, making SSL encryption no longer an optional part for many things that you build on the Web. SSL and HTTPS are becoming a requirement and for good reasons. I personally ran into this with the Google Maps API in one of my applications that now requires an HTTPS based client page in order to use this API. In this post I discuss some of the issues and why this is actually a good thing, and some of the steps I took to move my existing site to HTTPS.

Let's Encrypt is a new, open source certificate authority for creating free SSL certificates. In this post I show you how you can use some of the API clients on Windows to create Let's Encrypt certificates for use in IIS.