Question: I paid for an SSL certificate from Namecheap, I think it was certified by ComodoSSL. It cost me 7$, it took them a week to activate and I had to do it myself from SSH while editing my site's configuration files.

Then a friend made me aware of [Let's Encrypt](https://letsencrypt.org/) who not only give out free SSL certificates, but they can be installed by running a single command.

I'm sure I'm missing something here, but why would I want to pay for an SSL certificate when I can get one installed easily, for free, with automatic renewal set up?

Answer: 
Not everything can use automated renewal
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CertBot makes it easy to use for websites... but what if you're using certificates for other things?

We have an LDAP server that our website authenticates with. It runs over a secure port, but it needs a signed certificate to run. I could go with a free wildcard certificate... but that means converting the certificate to PKCS12 every 3 months (web servers use PEM) and then importing the new certificate. Oh, and our network firewall uses PKCS12, too. That's a lot of hassle for free.
The simple answer to this is many webmasters just don't want to do these things which unnecessarily consume their precious time. In case of letsencrypt its easy to use and free but you have to remember and re-install the certificate every 3 months. If you don't or just forget to do it then you site will show 404 error to your visitors and search engines.