The person isn’t talking about automating being difficult for a hosted website. They’re talking about a third party system that doesn’t give you an easy way to automate, just a web gui for uploading a cert. For example, our WAP interface or our on-premise ERP don’t offer a way to automate. Sure, we could probably create code to automate it and run the risk it breaks after a vendor update. It’s easier to pay for a 12 month cert and do it manually.

As a first book, I think Children of Time is much better than Shards of Earth. I enjoyed both series but would say the third book in each was the weakest. The Final Architecture series had a slightly stronger third entry.