I's only inconvenient because it isn't properly automated. That's by design.

When this can be a acme.sh script cronjob, there isn't much of an excuse. Even my Raspberry Pi dedicated to my 3D printer is happily renewing certificates.

At least with this thing breaking every 90 days you have it fresh on your mind. One year away you may not even remember what you have to do.

Needless to say, you have a bug to fix.

I think keeping the validity long just removes incentives for people to bother fixing their setups. We've seen the shift from "Craig needs to spend a few days on certificate renewal every year" to full automation in most environments when the 90 day validity period was introduced, and shortening it to a week will only help further automation.

You'll always have the option to skip the hassle (for a small fee, unless a Let's Encrypt competitor joins the market), but I feel the benefits outweigh the downsides.

I personally would've preferred something like DANE working, but because the best we've got is DNSSEC and most of the internet doesn't even bother implementing that, I doubt we'll ever see that replace the current CA system.

I also have hobby-level serving needs. I've been using LetsEncrypt since whenever it was they started. I have two top level domains and a whole lot of subdomains.

I've never had to babysit certificate renewal, nor had to log in manually to fix anything. Not once. How comes?

Clearly it's not working correctly, so a longer certificate lifetime wouldn't address the root cause - you would just have to fix your setup less often.

I think the drop-dead date for this product was like April 2015 or so. The ideal customer for a product like this (lazy and also incompetent but with plenty of money) is also likely to leave it too late. I won't guarantee we'd have caught that, but unlike forbidden steps taken to avert a bigger mess of ones own making (as happened for SHA-1 deprecation, some notable financial outfits secured certs which should not have existed, to cover for the fact they hadn't properly managed their own technical risks) this seems like a product category thing, nobody was openly selling certs that would just break in Chrome, that's a bad product.

[Why would such certificates break in Chrome? Google hate these long lived certs so Chrome treats certificates which have validity exceeding what the BRs authorise as immediately invalid, if you want to moan to Google about why your prohibited certs don't work you're basically admitting you violated your agreement with them so it's like showing up to claim your stolen rucksack full of cocaine from the cops...]

You only need the outage to last for the window of [begin renewal attempts, expiration], not the entire 6d lifetime.

For example, with the 90d certs, I think cert-manager defaults to renewal at 30d out. Let's assume the same grace, of ~33% of the total life, for the 6d certs: that means renew at 2d out. So if an outage persisted for 2d, those certs would be at risk of expiring.