Category: How to

Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to the people by the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) which provides people the digital certificates they need in order to enable HTTPS (SSL/TLS) for websites, for free, which otherwise requires considerable investment if it was to be bought from the paid SSL providers. The only downside being the need of renewing the certificate every 90 days. Though majority of hosting providers now offer it as part of their hosting services, some hosting providers like GoDaddy still have not provided any in-built support in their hosting solution instead offering its own paid SSL certificates. If we are using shared hosting, then we can manually install Let’s Encrypt certificates on GoDaddy websites. Let’s Encrypt provides client tools which can be installed on the web servers to automate installation and renewal of SSL certificates but in case of shared hosting,[…]

Many web hosting providers support and automatically enable Let’s Encrypt and redirect http to https by default. GoDaddy does not yet support it but we can manually install and configure our sites on GoDaddy shared hosting to support SSL. This is done in two steps. In the first step, we need to generate certificates from a certificate authority (CA) and then in the second step, we need to download generated certificates and upload it to the GoDaddy servers and configure it there. Support for third-party SSLs on GoDaddy While generating SSL certificates for our domain, we will also need to verify domain ownership to CA. In order to verify domain ownership using HTTP verification, we will need to create appropriate files with specific text strings under “httpdocs/.well-known/pki-validation/” directory on our web server. We also need to make sure that those appropriate files are accessible in the directory. We will first[…]