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Managing TLS certificates at a veterinary clinic
18 Jan 2024
How a veterinary clinic deals with TLS certificates — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: identical titles on every inner page. The certificate chain breaks for a veterinary clinic.
You do not need a status page if you have never gone down. a veterinary clinic is on month fourteen of zero downtime, and the secret is boring: correct TLS certificates and a host that does not oversell.
We deployed a fix for TLS certificates 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.
a veterinary clinic did not want to hear about TLS certificates. They wanted to know: will the site work tomorrow morning. The answer was yes, but only if we fix identical titles on every inner page today.
We document TLS certificates in a shared spreadsheet. It is not glamorous, but a veterinary clinic can open it on their phone at midnight if something breaks.
We rotate API keys for TLS certificates annually. a veterinary clinic did not see the point until we showed them the access log: the old key had been used from an IP in a country nobody on their team has visited.
If you only touch TLS certificates once a year, a dashboard is extra risk. Files, a mailbox you read, and a person who still answers will outlast any SaaS control panel.
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