You use hostnames? There's nothing wrong with the idea, if it just needs encryption. As-is it's not safe to use.

The biggest thing it needs is mandatory encryption... Providing the public key hash of the server, this way, you can't preform a MitM attack, and there is no need for a third party (even if mutually trusted) to verify and sign the certificate. Instead of using a host, you would use hash@host like "f013d66c7f6817d08b7eb2a93e6d0440c1f3e7f8@example.com"