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TLS certificates: a field note from a language school
8 Dec 2025
How a language school deals with TLS certificates — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: a form that emails a shared inbox. The certificate chain breaks for a language school.
We got a call from a language school on a Friday. Their TLS certificates had expired overnight, and the booking page was returning errors to every visitor.
The most expensive outage for a language school was not a hack — it was a form that emails a shared inbox. Nobody attacked anything. The config just drifted.
Maintenance is not glamorous, but it is the reason a language school has not had downtime since we took over TLS certificates. The invoice is small and the peace of mind is large.
The job started when a language school realised their TLS certificates had been wrong for months. Nobody noticed because the site still loaded.
Before you touch TLS certificates, take a screenshot of the current state. Half of our emergency calls come from people who cannot remember what was there before the change.
The fix was to delete the old entry, wait for TTL to expire, and re-add TLS certificates with the correct value. We scheduled it for 3 AM so nobody lost traffic.
Nobody at a language school could remember who had configured TLS certificates. The credentials were in a text file inside a folder called OLD STUFF on a shared drive.
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