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Why TLS certificates matters for a driving school
11 May 2024
How a driving school deals with TLS certificates — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: an SPF record overwritten during a DNS edit. The certificate chain breaks for a driving school.
Maintenance is not glamorous, but it is the reason a driving school has not had downtime since we took over TLS certificates. The invoice is small and the peace of mind is large.
WordPress can handle TLS certificates 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 once forgot to renew TLS certificates for a weekend project and it took down a page that a driving school linked to from a print flyer. We now set auto-renew on everything.
A form that collects data for a driving school should say where the message goes. Nine fields and a captcha on a quiet Tuesday will cost you the person who actually wanted to pay.
Two-factor on the registrar account is the single highest-value thing we do for a driving school when managing TLS certificates. Everything else can be rebuilt; a stolen domain cannot.
We run a monthly diff on DNS for a driving school. If a record changes and nobody in the team made the change, we get an alert. an SPF record overwritten during a DNS edit was caught this way last quarter.
We hand over a one-page document after every TLS certificates job. It says what was changed, what the login is, and what to check if something feels wrong. a driving school keeps it in a drawer they actually open.
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