Let’s Encrypt, the free Certificate Authority has announced that it now supports issuing wildcard certificates for your domains.

Wildcard certificates will be issued only through the ACMEv2 protocol. You might need to update your client before it supports it.

What are Wildcard Certificates?

Wildcard certificates allow you to secure all subdomains of a domain with a single certificate.

Let’s assume you own a site – tumblr.com, where people can signup and host their sites on your subdomains. Without a wildcard certificate, you would need to issue a certificate for every user who signs up, and make sure they are renewed.

There is a limit of 100 certificates per domain in Let’s Encrypt, so this will quickly hamper your ability to grow.

People buy a wildcard certificate from a CA, for a huge amount of money to support this functionality.

Don’t need to do that anymore. Let’s Encrypt now supports issuing wildcard certificates with DNS verification.

If you’re going to use SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt, you’ll need to monitor them, in case your renewal cron doesn’t work. CertsMonitor will help you do that!