Terms of use

1. About these terms

These terms govern your use of the website at certsteady.com, including the free Certificate Readiness Check, its reports and our guides. CertSteady is operated by Smbat Tonoyan, Yerevan, Armenia (“CertSteady”, “we”, “us”).

By using the website you agree to these terms. If you do so on behalf of a company or other organization, you confirm that you may accept these terms for it, and “you” includes that organization. If you do not agree, please do not use the website.

The website is free. There are no accounts, subscriptions or purchases. Our Privacy policy explains how we handle personal data.

CertSteady is designed for businesses and IT professionals who manage websites and servers, and is not directed at children.

2. The free check

The Certificate Readiness Check is a free tool. You enter a domain; we look up the public certificates and host names logged for it in Certificate Transparency logs, check the certificate each host serves over HTTPS, flag certificates that look manually renewed, and estimate how many renewals per year shorter certificate lifetimes will mean for them. No account is needed. The number of checks per visitor is limited.

The check only reads data that is already public. It never asks for, accesses or stores private keys, passwords or access to your systems, and it does not change anything on your servers.

3. Results are estimates

Please read a report as a starting point for your own review:

• Whether a certificate looks manually or automatically renewed is a heuristic based on public signals such as the issuer and validity period. It can be wrong for individual certificates.
• Renewal projections are lower bounds: they count renewals for the certificates we found under the published lifetime limits, and real workloads are often higher.
• Certificate Transparency logs and live server responses can be incomplete, delayed or unavailable, so a report may miss certificates or hosts, or show data that has since changed.

The results are general information, not professional, security, legal or compliance advice. Check important certificates yourself before you make decisions based on them.

4. Acceptable use

You agree to:

• check only domains that you own or operate, or that you are authorized to assess, for example as the IT provider of their owner;
• use the check through its website at a normal human pace: no scripts, crawlers, lists of domains or other automated or bulk use;
• not get around rate limits or other protections, for example by rotating IP addresses or networks;
• not use the website to attack, map, harass or overload any third party’s systems;
• not probe, overload or disrupt the website, access reports that were not shared with you, or reverse engineer the website to find ways to misuse it;
• not use the website in breach of any law or of anyone else’s rights.

Good-faith security research is welcome under the rules on our Security page.

5. How our scanner behaves

When a check starts, our server queries public Certificate Transparency data for the domain and then, for each host name found (up to 100 per check), opens one TLS connection to port 443, completes the handshake to read the certificate, and closes the connection. It tries no other ports, sends no HTTP requests to the hosts being checked and follows no redirects.

HTTP requests the scanner makes identify themselves with the user agent CertSteady/0.1.0 (+https://certsteady.com/security). Host operators who see traffic they did not expect can contact us at [email protected].

6. Shareable report links

Each report has an unlisted link containing a long random identifier. Reports are not listed anywhere and are marked so that search engines do not index them, but anyone who has the link can view the report. Share it only with people you want to see it, and do not share it if the details are sensitive for you.

Reports are temporary: they are deleted automatically once they are no longer needed to show the result of a check, so save or print a copy if you want to keep one. To have a report deleted earlier, email [email protected] with its link.

7. Third-party data and services

Reports are built from data we do not control, mainly public Certificate Transparency logs and search services, DNS, and the certificates that servers present. We are not responsible for the accuracy, completeness or availability of that data, and checks may be limited or unavailable when those sources are.

8. Intellectual property

The website, including its code, design, text, guides, logos and the CertSteady name, belongs to us or our licensors. These terms do not give you any rights to it other than those they describe.

You may use, save, print and share the reports you receive, for your own purposes and those of your clients. The public data in them, such as certificate details, does not belong to us. You keep any rights you have in the domains you enter; you allow us to use them only to provide and protect the service.

9. Availability, changes and suspension

We aim to keep the website available but do not promise that it will be uninterrupted or error free. We may change, limit or stop any part of the website or the check, including rate limits and the number of hosts checked, at any time.

We may block or limit access to the website, refuse checks of particular domains, or delete reports without notice if we reasonably believe the service is being misused, these terms are being broken, or it is needed to protect the service, other users or third parties.

10. Disclaimer of warranties

The website and the check are provided free of charge, “as is” and “as available”. To the extent permitted by law, we make no warranties or guarantees of any kind, express or implied, about them, including about accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement or that they will meet your needs. Some countries do not allow certain warranties to be excluded; in that case they are limited to the minimum the law allows.

11. Limitation of liability

CertSteady is a free service. To the extent permitted by law, we have no liability to you arising from your use of the website or the check, or from reliance on their results. In particular, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, including loss of profits, revenue, business, goodwill or data, business interruption, or outages caused by an expired certificate or a missed renewal.

CertSteady helps you see your certificates and plan their renewal; you remain responsible for renewing and deploying the certificates on your systems.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for intent or gross negligence, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded by law, and nothing affects your mandatory rights as a consumer.

12. Responsibility for misuse

If you misuse the website in breach of section 4 or of the law, and a third party brings a claim against us as a result, you agree to cover the reasonable losses and costs we incur because of that claim, to the extent permitted by law. This does not apply to claims caused by our own fault.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms when CertSteady or the law changes. The date and version at the top show the current version. Material changes will be announced on the site before they take effect, unless they are needed earlier to comply with the law or to keep the service secure. If you keep using the website after a change takes effect, the new terms apply; if you do not agree, please stop using it.

14. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of Armenia, and the courts of Yerevan have jurisdiction over any dispute about them or the website.

If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protection of mandatory laws of the country where you live, and you may also bring a claim in the courts of that country where its law allows. Please contact us first: most problems can be solved by email.

15. General

If any part of these terms is found invalid or unenforceable, the rest stays in effect. If we do not enforce a right straight away, we do not give it up. We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to a new operator of CertSteady, who will be bound by them. These terms are the whole agreement between you and us about the website.

16. Contact

Questions about these terms: [email protected]. Operator: Smbat Tonoyan, Yerevan, Armenia.