certificate renewals for a small hotel

When a small hotel moved hosts, the outage was not the new box — it was a 2 MB photo in a 320-pixel slot. We keep TTL short the week of a move, then raise it once everything is stable.

Test certificate renewals from outside your network before you call it done. Your office Wi-Fi might cache the old answer for another six hours.

WordPress can handle certificate renewals with a plugin. But the plugin adds JavaScript, a dashboard, and a support ticket when it conflicts with the next update. We wrote four lines of config instead.

We deployed a fix for certificate renewals at 5 PM on a Friday. It worked, but if it had not, we would have had no one available. We no longer push to production after Thursday noon.

We document certificate renewals in a shared spreadsheet. It is not glamorous, but a small hotel can open it on their phone at midnight if something breaks.

Every CMS update brings a small chance that certificate renewals breaks. For a small hotel, we pin versions and test upgrades in a staging copy before touching production.

We check certificate renewals for a small hotel once a quarter. It takes five minutes and has caught two problems in the past year. Both would have caused downtime within a week.

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