you have a lot of certificates created.
Use one of these the next 60 - 85 days.
and it did create additional certificates (duplicated existing ones). I thought I would wait and see how will it behave. And page next day had expired cert. Then I manually removed all certs from several dirs (eg. rm -rdf /etc/letsencrypt/renewal) hoping to run clean cert creation.
Never add --force-renewal to your cron job.
If you use certonly, the certificate isn’t installed, so your old certificate isn’t replaced.
The cron job is the wrong place to test such things.
Well yeah I now read there is a sandbox mode. But what should we do now?
So does anyone know what should I do at this point?
I expected that rate-limits are restored on Monday and Friday. Was I wrong?
Will I have to wait for another couple of days to finally be able to recreate cert?
The rate limit is a sliding window. You have created 5 certificates 2019-01-31, so you can create the next certificate 2019-02-06.
Deleting active and valide certificates is always a bad idea.
You can add a second domain name (www or something else), but then you must validate the second domain name. And there is a maximum of 50 certificates per domain per week.