Let’s Encrypt announced today that they plan to offer wildcard certificates beginning in January 2018.
A wildcard certificate can secure any number of subdomains of a base domain (e.g. *.example.com). This allows administrators to use a single certificate and key pair for a domain and all of its subdomains, which can make HTTPS deployment significantly easier.
Wildcard certificates will be offered free of charge via our upcoming ACME v2 API endpoint. We will initially only support base domain validation via DNS for wildcard certificates, but may explore additional validation options over time. We encourage people to ask any questions they might have about wildcard certificate support on our community forums.
That is excellent news. Wildcard certificates are fairly expensive. I’m paying $94/year for a Comodo PositiveSSL wildcard cert through a reseller. If you go directly to Comodo, they want $249/year which is going to be well out of the range of a lot of people to afford.
It will be interesting to see what the uptake is on this, as I assume wildcard certificates are a major profit center for certificate authorities. It would also be interesting to see an analysis of what effect Let’s Encrypt has had on the economics of CA’s already.
Are those who use Let’s Encrypt large companies and individuals who weren’t using SSL at all beforehand, or is a significant portion of that activity from people who opted for a free alternative.
I know I was at the point where I needed to buy a single domain certificate last year and opted for Let’s Encrypt because of its low, low price of nothing.