Since its inception, Sunshine Tech and Media has been offering free and automatically installed SSL certificates powered by Let’s Encrypt.
Due to the fact that having an SSL certificate (https/green lock) is a necessity nowadays, most customers enjoy the fact that they don’t have to pay anything or even do any work to attain and set up an SSL certificate. Offering this also gives us the added benefit of contributing towards a more secure internet.
However, it is easy for first-time customers to become confused as to how exactly to deal with Let’s Encrypt. As such, I have assembled a short guide to help clear things up:
Free SSL Certificate Requirements
1. DNS Must Resolve – Check your website with a DNS tool to ensure that your DNS configuration is resolving to our name servers. If you have recently changed your name servers, allow up to 24 hours for the DNS records to propagate.
2. .htaccess File Must Be Writeable – In order to allow for Let’s Encrypt to validate your website, it must be able to write to your .htaccess file in the /public_html/ directory.
Once these two conditions have been met, the SSL certifcate will generate within a 24 hour timespan.
How To Check For Your Free SSL Certificate
Log into cPanel using our client area and navigate to SSL/TLS > Generate, view, upload, or delete SSL certificates.
If the issuer does not say Let’s Encrypt, then your website is not using the automatically generated certificate.
How To Manually Run AutoSSL
In order to avoid waiting 24 hours for the certificate to generate and install, it is possible to manually run AutoSSL with a simple process.
Log in to cPanel and navigate to cPanel > SSL/TLS Status > Select Domain(s) > Click Run AutoSSL
This can take a short amount of time to run, so make sure to leave your browser window open.
Thank you for reading through our guide. For high-speed shared hosting, make sure to view our package options.