Recently, popular business and employment service LinkedIn allowed one of their SSL/TLS certificates to expire before renewing.
This left users with a certificate error when navigating around LinkedIn posts.
Causing much user confusion, it quickly became the object of Tweets and online articles.
Though brief, the certificate downtime clearly caused negative publicity for LinkedIn, a website with more than 260 million monthly active users.
Above all, this lapse in SSL/TLS certificate activity could have been easily avoided had the certificate simply been renewed early.
Why to renew early
A common reason for leaving the renewal of an SSL/TLS certificate until the day of expiry is the misconception that early renewal means losing out on time left on the active certificate.
This is not the case.
If a user were to renew their certificate 90 days before expiry, those 90 days would be added to the newly issued certificate.
Hence, if it were a 24 month certificate, it would actually have a (roughly) 27 month validity period.
This is to incentivize good security practices on the World Wide Web, ensuring domain owners have no reason or excuse not to keep their domains secured.
Certificate types
Some SSL/TLS certificates can take longer than others to get issued, thus we recommend renewing as early as possible.
For instance, EV certificates require a subscriber agreement, certificate request form and telephone verification call be completed, alongside the standard domain control validation, before they can be issued.
Similarly, SAN certificates, which can host up to 250 domains/subdomains, require domain control validation be completed for each root domain included.
As a result, some users may take a few days to get all this validation completed.
For those reasons, leaving as long as possible to get the certificate issued is the most sensible thing to do, as it removes any chance of a lapse in security.
Renewing with Trustico
When renewing with Trustico, the following renewal bonuses are available:
| Renewal Bonus Options | Validity Bonus |
| Renew 1 – 15 Days Before Expiry | 30 Extra Days Added To Order |
| Renew 15 – 45 Days Before Expiry | 60 Extra Days Added To Order |
| Renew 45 – 90 Days Before Expiry | 90 Extra Days Added To Order |
| Renew 1 – 15 Days After Expiry | 30 Extra Days Added To Order |
Mitchell has a Bachelor of Arts with Majors in Journalism and Foreign Relations; and a Diploma of Digital Design.