Let’s Encrypt SSL Troubleshooting

Below you can find some of the common errors associated with issuing SSL certificates under the Let’s Encrypt Free SSL Project.

Rate limit error – too many certificates for this domain

Most likely, you have issued and deleted certificates of the same root domain too many times. These limits are quite low during the Let’s Encrypt beta period.

Rate limit error – too many registrations

The server may have hit a rate limit for too many new account registrations for a single IP address.

In this case, you should be able to proceed within 24 hours.

authz error

This is intermittent with the Let’s Encrypt service, you should be able to try again immediately and succeed.

Failed to issue certificate: The Let’s Encrypt HTTP challenge failed – is .well-known/acme-challenge accessible in your webroot?

First, you need to check that you can actually access http://your-domain.com/.well-known/acme-challenge . If you cannot, then the issue is likely an .htaccessrule blocking access, such as the following, which prevents access to dotdirs:

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} -d [OR]
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule "(^|/)\." - [F]