Let's Encrypt FREE SSL & Yearly Renewals

Let's Encrypt (aka LE) is indeed providing free TLS domain validated certificates for many domains on a single certificate. Coming soon is actually the wildcard feature so you can do *.domain.ext and the certificate will be valid for the main domain and all subdomains of it . Couple this with multiple domains per certificate and you can get tons of site under one roof with a single certificate.

And yeah... a little bummer is that the certificates need to be renewed every 3 months but the cool thing is their client can do this automatically once you simply setup a short cronjob that runs the renew command every day or every few days. You also get notifications before your certificate expires so you can renew it manually if you can't/don't want it to happen automatically.

I use LE on my servers and it is great. Setup is generally easy and automated renewal through cronjobs also works.