How to Issue An SSL Certificate For Your Site For Free – With Let’s Encrypt
Have you heard of SSL Certificate before? You might not, but you’ll surely be familiar with the green padlock icon that appears in your browser beside the https:// URL when you visit a certain site. 🙂
Well it turns out that green padlock icon is a mark of a website that is using an encryption technology called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), that basically makes sure nobody can read, or know any informations that are being sent and received from and to the website that you’re visiting.
Although it used to only be utilized by financial institutions and website that deals with sensitive information, recently there’s been a drive for all websites to utilize SSL & https, in the wake of suveillance revelations. In fact, starting from  this month (January 2017), Google will mark website that doesn’t use SSL/https but has any credit card form on its page to be insecure.
Also, do you know that Google actually boost the rankings of websites that use SSL on its search engine? Yes, in fact, they’ve been doing that since 2014.
Just two of that reasons alone, should make you start thinking about using SSL for your site. But SSL Certificate cost is not cheap, right? Well yes. SSL certificate cost can go upwards of thousands of dollars. And that still doesn’t count the difficulties in installing it on your website. Plus, you need a dedicated IP to use them.
Well fear no more. because through the help of Server Name Indication (SNI), shared hosting customers without a dedicated IP can now use SSL certificate. Not only that, if your hosting provider have Let’s Encrypt integrated to their control panel, you can issue an SSL certificate, headache-free, in just seconds. After that, your website too, can enjoy having that green padlock icon clearly displayed for all to see.
Well, it turns out that we are one of those hosting providers that have Let’s Encrypt integrated to our control panel. In fact, you can issue unlimited SSL for all of your domains with just a single click. 🙂
So how can you do it?
Well, first, login to your control panel. We use cPanel, and your login details are in your welcome email. So enter them.
Then, in the search box, type Let’s Encrypt. You should get:
Then, you should see this screen, which is pretty self explanatory. It lists all the domains currently registered to your accounts, including addon domain, and on the right, there’s “Issue”. What are you waiting for, then? Click “Issue”. 😀
After that, it will show this screen, which basically asked you whether or not you also want to certify the alias for your domain, such as www.example.com, and mail.example.com, the latter being the portal to your webmail.It also asked whether you want to install Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate to your mail server. This will all be checked to be included by default, and using the default setting should be fine.
Click “Issue”, and your certificate is now installed! Open your website with https:// before the URL and you will (hopefully) now sees that your website is now secured by SSL.
It’s that easy. And if you need more support, you can always submit a ticket to us and we’ll issue them for you, all for free! 😀