If you’ve worked with a web team for long enough you’ll have heard the panic that ensues when a client’s website has gone down for seemingly no good reason. The client is on the phone demanding answers and nobody on the team has the faintest idea what caused the downtime.
“Call the hosting company!” shouts one technical lead. “Who last deployed to the website?” shouts another horrified developer. It’s a nightmare. Then somebody, usually after thirty minutes of serious head scratching, mentions that Mike who usually monitors domain renewals has been off the last couple of weeks – “did he actually renew customersdomain.com?”.
Nope.
A similarly painful version of this story is based upon the customer’s SSL certificate biting the dust. It could be that the cert expired, became invalid for some reason. Who knows. All the customer cares about is that their website is offline for seemingly no good reason.
We had an SSL certificate expire on us a few years ago and decided to create an internal tool to monitor all of the domain and SSL certificate expiry dates for us. It’s simple enough, you enter the domain – it grabs the domain and SSL cert expiry automatically, and then emails one or more people automatically as the expiry dates near. Took a couple of days to put together and we decided that the web community could use such a tool.
So here it is – Expirify, the free domain and SSL checker. Go sign up and use it for free. If it saves just one web development team from the fear and panic that can ensue from missing these expiry dates, we’ll be glad we published it.