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Free SSL Certificate on GoDaddy Shared Hosting

An update to this post can be found here.

Shared hosting is still the easiest and cheapest for those who do LAMP. And now if the hosting uses cPanel then it can host your domains with free SSL certificates.

You can get free SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt. And you can get them faster from SSL For Free.

Let's go to the SSL For Free website. Your domains will be running on free SSL certificates by following these three steps. Enter your domain names in the field shown on the front page of the site, and click Create Free SSL Ceritificate.

The first step is to verify your domain names. You will be given 3 options: Automatic FTP Verification, Manual Verification, and Manual Verification (DNS). I prefer the second option to the others, Manual Verification, because it is non intrusive and I don't have to give away any of my password. The verification is required by SSL For Free to ensure that you truly own the domain names and have a host for each of them.

The following is the instructions for domain name verification. You will be instructed to create a folder with a sub-folder in your domain host where you will upload 2 files generated by SSL For Free. Just follow the given instructions. If your domain is not empty and have a .htaccess file then you will need to temporarily rename the file so that to disable the URL rewrite. You must rename the .htaccess file back after the verification is done.

If your domain is pointing to a folder in your host then make sure the instructions above are done on that folder.

While on the SSL For Free website, click Download SSL Certificate. This is the second step where you will be given the free SSL certificate. You will be given 3 certificate files where the contents of the files are listed to you. The contents can be selected for copy and paste later. The files are Certificate, Private Key, and CA Bundle.

The third step is to install the free SSL certificate into your shared hosting server. Login to your shared hosting server. In GoDaddy, navigate to your products. And in Web Hosting, click Manage. There will be another Manage button, click it. You will be redirected to cPanel.  In Security, click SSL/TLS. Under the subtitle Install and Manage SSL for your site (HTTPS), click Manage SSL sites.

Under the subtitle Install an SSL Website, select your domain name that you had verified earlier. There will be 3 text input fields for Certificate, Private Key, and Certificate Authority Bundle (CA Bundle). Copy the respective file contents generated by SSL For Free earlier and paste them into the text input fields accordingly. Then, click Install Certificate.

That's all. You can then navigate to your sites HTTPS. If you have more domain names then you need to repeat the steps above.

The free SSL certificates last for 90 days. You will have to repeat the same steps above to renew them. Hopefully in the near future, GoDaddy will do it for you automatically and for free. Until then and until they change all the steps, you may still need to refer to this post when you need a free SSL certificate.





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