SSLping was born as a side project. It’s useful to people, which is cool, but today it was also helpful to me! I use it to monitor my HTTPS websites. This morning, my own SSLping project sent me an email about how my website https://hire.chris-hartwig.com is about to expire (in 10 days): it’s using Letsencrypt, and it’s been 80 days since I installed the cert.
TL;DR you’re never done with Let’s encrypt: once your servers are secure, you must ensure they stay that way. Let’s encrypt is a no brainer: this initiative benefits us all, with free domain-validated certificates. It’s easy to setup and free. There’s probably automatic installation for your web server of choice, the community behind it can help, and tutorials are everywhere. Then you head to https://
In this post, we will set up a simple SSL certificate expiry monitoring, using cron, ssl-cert-check script and a fail-safe provided by an external service, healthchecks.io.
