Do you know what is the most common reason a website goes down?
The answer is simply that someone forgot to renew the SSL Certificate!
In the past, most websites operated without a SSL Certificate – remember when it was always ‘https://’ and very seldom ‘https://’?
The ‘s’ at the end ensures that the connection is encrypted and that the publisher is who he claims to be. An SSL certificate keeps sensitive information like credit card data private by scrambling data as it travels to and from your website. And HTTPS encryption ensures that no one can access or monitor communications to or from your website.
It all took off a few years ago when professional website owners started to implement SSL Certificates (‘https://’) but most didn’t know about it. It became a necessity for everyone when Google decided to punish search ranking for the ones that didn’t protect their websites with an SSL Certificate and that’s where we are today!
SSL Certificates used to be costly and also a bit complex to obtain, but today it’s easier than ever and the cost has come down significantly. We can thank Goddady.com for this great evolution and the rest of the market has followed!
Today almost everyone got an SSL Certificate and that’s great for everyone! But, with added components, comes added maintenance! You’ll need to keep track of exactly when your SSL Certificates expires so that you can renew in time.
Having your processes in order so that you renew before and not after expiration is key! When an SSL Certificate expires, your website is down until you install a renewed certificate. This is totally unnecessary and a website going down because someone didn’t renew in time shouldn’t happen.
But we’re all humans, and humans sometimes forget!
When you use Awakish, you can keep track of all your SSL Certificates and get notifications so that you get plenty of time to renew without stress! Setting up monitoring of an SSL Certificate takes 60 seconds and it’s time well spent so that you eliminate the most common reason for websites going down!
Regards, Per
PS. You can also use our unique Badges if you want to embed status about your SSL Certificates on Slack, Teams or a custom dashboard web page.