thanks. we are running a older version of Ubuntu and the mechanism to renew broke due to lack of support. took a while to figure out how to do it. I have it working now and everything should be back to normal.
Excellent. If you're looking for an alternative in the future, try https://github.com/Neilpang/acme.sh It really is set and forget.
nice! I will use that next time this comes up. i did put the renew command in crontab so hopefully it will be done periodically from now on.