1) Yes, my other server is down, actually it's up, it's just not responding on port 80 or 443, don't know why, don't have SSH keys on my phone, nothing I can do till Sunday.
2) Letsencrypt...I'm not sure what the problem is. If nginx is running, cerbot will complain the port is already in use, and won't update anyway...you need to stop nginx, do certbot renew, then start nginx again.
If I'm missing something, or if there's some other client that works differently, can't you just
location ~ /\.well-known/acme-challenge {
root /path/to/webroot;
}
?And 3) I'll be back about 3am Sunday to check stuff in.