For freelance developers
SSL and domain expiry monitoring for freelance developers
You look after a dozen or so sites for past clients, some on a small retainer and some out of goodwill. You are one person, so nobody else watches the certificates while you are on holiday. And when something expires, it is your phone that rings.
01 — What goes wrong
Where things usually go wrong
- 01
Nobody else is on call
There is no colleague to notice the alert while you are on a plane. You want warnings early enough that they can wait until Monday.
- 02
Clients who own their own accounts
The client insisted on registering the domain themselves. Good for them, until the renewal reminder lands in an inbox they check twice a year.
- 03
Old demos and side projects
The client demo on a subdomain of your own site, the portfolio piece from 2022, the API you meant to shut down. They still have certificates, and some of them still renew.
- 04
Checking takes time you can't bill
Logging into eleven hosting panels to confirm everything is fine is real work. Nobody pays for it and nobody thanks you for it.
02 — What helps
What matters most for you
- Free to start
- 5 domains on the Free plan, no card. Freelancer is $9/month for 50 domains and 10 clients.
- Alerts on your phone
- Telegram, Discord, Slack or email, at 30, 14, 7, 3, 1 and 0 days. Early warnings mean most of them can wait for a weekday.
- Renewal overdue, weeks before expiry
- ACME certificates (Let's Encrypt, ZeroSSL, Google Trust Services) normally renew when about a third of their lifetime remains. When one passes that point without renewing, we flag it as renewal overdue, usually weeks before it expires. For Let's Encrypt we read its ACME Renewal Information window.
- Expiry dates in your calendar
- An iCal feed of every certificate and domain expiry date, so renewals show up next to your other deadlines.
- Something to send the client
- A monthly PDF report per client with a short written summary, on Freelancer. It is the easiest way to show a retainer is doing something.
03 — Practical notes
A setup that fits one person
Monitoring for a solo developer should be quiet most of the time and impossible to miss when it matters. That means few alerts, sent early, to one place you actually look.
- Send alerts to a single channel on your phone, not your main inbox. Telegram or a private Discord channel works well.
- Warn at 30 days for domains. Registrar problems, like an expired card or a locked account, take days to sort out.
- Trust automated certificates to renew, but check that they did. A Let's Encrypt certificate that is still the same one at the two-thirds mark has missed its renewal.
- Once a quarter, run your own domain through the subdomain certificate finder. Old demos turn up there.
Check one site right now
Paste a hostname into the SSL checker to see the expiry date, issuer, chain and whether the certificate matches the hostname. The domain expiry checker does the same for the registration. Our guide on checking SSL certificate expiration covers the command-line version, if you prefer that.
Put it in the agreement
Most freelance expiry stories end with "I thought they were renewing it". A few lines in your maintenance agreement prevent that:
- Who holds the registrar account, and who pays the renewal.
- Which hostnames you monitor, and which you don't.
- How quickly you respond to an expiry warning, and whether that is billable.
- What happens when the client moves hosting without telling you.
None of this needs software. It helps when the checks run on their own, though: ExpiryOwl checks certificates every 6 hours and domains daily, and the Free plan covers 5 domains.
Start with five domains, free.
The free plan watches 5 domains for one client: certificates, domain registration, DNS and uptime every 15 minutes. No card, no trial clock.