Alibaba Cloud SSL products recently issued an announcement. The announcement shows that the manufacturer policy will take effect from November 14, 2023. The validity period of the free SSL certificate will be unified to 3 months after issuance, and the 1-year free certificate will no longer be provided for free. The provider of Alibaba Cloud's free SSL certificate is the intermediate CA Tianwei Chengxin, and the ROOTCA is DigiCert. At present, DigiCert does not seem to make such requirements, and it should be unilaterally requested by Tianwei Chengxin.
Bluepoint.com consulted other agents in the CA industry and found that the free certificates provided by DigiCert's other domestic agents cooperating with the cloud platform are still one year. For example, the free certificates applied for through Qiniu CDN and issued by TrustAsia are still one year.
Therefore, if users really need to use the 1-year version of the certificate, they can consider using other cloud platforms such as Qiniu to apply. They do not have to apply for a free certificate through Alibaba Cloud.
Of course, the 1-year version certificate is indeed more popular than the 3-month version, so there is no need to renew and renew the certificate frequently. However, these limited-free 1-year certificates are also for DV single domain name, which is not convenient for users with multiple domain names.