Get a free SSL certificate to encrypt your website

encrypt website

We all know having an SSL (secure socket layer) certificate installed on your domain helps protect users coming to your website. An SSL certificate would be required if users are coming onto your website and ordering goods or services from you to protect both their identity and payment information.

Using an SSL can also help your website SEO as it shows Google, Bing and other search bots that your website is protected and safe.

A lot of companies are not aware when having a website that they can have more protection added to their website, leaving them at risk from 3rd parties that try to tamper or gain access to your website. Our recommendation is that even if you don't have an online shop or sell goods/services on your site, having one will simply show people coming on your website that you are secure and mean business. Chances are they'll be more happy to browse your site and potentially buy any products if you sell online products or services.

Advantages of having an SSL certificate

So what are the advantages of http vs https? We'll quite a few actually:

  • Increased Rankings - Yes its confirmed by Google and you'll notice a slight increase once you have installed your SSL on your website for several days but only accounts for about 1% of Google's Algorithm.
  • Security & Privacy - HTTPS prevents tampering by third parties, makes your site more secure for visitors and encrypts all communication between the server and user including browser history and credit card numbers.

    • What do I need to look for in an SSL

    When choosing your SSL certificate the main points you need to look for:

  • How secure is the SSL key - We recommend a 2048-bit key certificate.
  • Don't block your website from Google or any other search engine bots as they won't be able to access your robots.txt which is required to keep your website updated on search engines.
  • Add an HTTPS version of your website on Google Webmaster Tools and get Google to crawl all new HTTPS links on your website.

    • How do I install an SSL certificate

    Our recommendation is if you aren't very IT savvy is to let your web hosting provider do it for you, and they usually do it free of charge if you are hosting with them. We also offer the option to get a free Lets Encrypt SSL with any of our web hosting packages.

    Where can I get a free SSL

    Until recently to get an SSL you had to pay for and they weren't cheap, unless you was creating a self-signed certificate for personal use, but this left errors for anyone coming to your site. Now you can get a free SSL from Lets Encrypt. They have had a massive amount of support with their campaign for all websites to be able to get a free SSL certificate.

    Getting your free SSL is easy, simply head over to certbot.eff.org where you can select the server software type you are using on your server. If you don't know what software is running on your server ask your hosting provider.

  • Apache
  • Nginx
  • Haproxy
  • Plesk

    • They also include a wide variety of operating systems that are compatible.

  • Web hosting service
  • Debian 7 (wheezy)
  • Debian 8 (jessie)
  • Debian testing / unstable
  • Debian (other)
  • Ubuntu 16.10
  • Ubuntu 16.04
  • Ubuntu 14.04
  • Ubuntu (other)
  • Gentoo
  • Arch Linux
  • Fedora 22
  • Fedora 23+
  • CentOS 6
  • CentOS 7
  • CentOS 8
  • RHEL 6
  • RHEL 7
  • FreeBSD
  • OpenBSD
  • Mac OS X
  • Other unix
  • Non-unix

    • Lets Encrypt can also be found at sslforfree.com

    Install Lets Encrypt on cPanel server

    All hosting accounts can use the Lets Encrypt FREE SSL service by installing it on a cPanel Server. To do this simply login into your server as root SSH using a programme such as Putty then copy and paste in the following command:

    /scripts/install_lets_encrypt_autossl_provider

    The server administrator can then use Auto SSL to install new SSL certificates on domains from Lets Encrypt and hosting customers on the SSL/TLS icon in their cPanel control panel. We also provide free SSL installations on our server and can install these by contacting us.

    Install Lets Encrypt on Directadmin

    To enable this feature in DirectAdmin, ensure you have DirectAdmin 1.50.1 or newer.

    If you're running CentOS 6 or newer, it's recommended to set DA to allow SNI. This will keep the setup simpler, especially when setting up SSL under an Admin account on the server IP (so it's not installed globally)

    Enable the letsencrypt=1 option in the directadmin.conf and restart DirectAdmin

    echo "action=directadmin&value=restart" >> /usr/local/directadmin/data/task.queue; /usr/local/directadmin/dataskq d2000

    Add the /.well-known Alias:

    cd /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild
    ./build rewrite_confs

    Install the most recent version of the script:

    cd /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild
    ./build update
    ./build letsencrypt

    Users should then be able to install their own SSL within their Directadmin control panel.

    If you are wanting a website with free SSL included, check out our DirectAdmin web hosting packages.