I’m happy to announce that GreenGeeks is now offering our customers free Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL Certificates for their websites.
For those of you who don’t know, Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated and open certificate authority (CA) that is run for the public’s benefit. It allows website owners to enable HTTPS (SSL/TLS) on their websites free of charge.
So why SSL on your website?
An SSL certificate for your website is a must. In the past, we have written about why SSL is good for improving your SEO ranking and now it’s more important than ever, as Google announced that it will begin marking websites without HTTPS as “Not Secure” in Chrome. This is expected to begin sometime early July 2018. Not implementing SSL on your website will cause you to lose website visitors and search engine rankings and is one of the reasons we have been encouraging the use of SSL from the start of the movement.
GreenGeeks delay on Let’s Encrypt.
I’ll be the first to admit that we weren’t the first to come out with Let’s Encrypt, but we have a couple of reasons for that. As you know, Let’s Encrypt’s certificates renew every 90-days and the existing tools available did a horrible job of managing and renewing certificates. This led to websites going offline if the certificate failed to renew and expired. We couldn’t accept that and we didn’t want to subject our customers to that sort of service interruption. Given our size, it would’ve been a nightmare to keep up with. So, we opted to wait until we could build a proper solution. Then there’s efficiency. We felt that Wildcard SSL would be better for performance as it would eliminate the need for multiple certs for the same domain name.
We feel the wait was worth it. We feel that we have a superior version of Let’s Encrypt by allowing for a more efficient implementation which gives us better control, insight and the ability to easily take care of the certificate renewal process.
Differences between Premium SSL & Let’s Encrypt
Despite offering free Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL, we continue to provide Premium SSL certificates through GlobalSign for customers who need them. While the Let’s Encrypt is great for those running personal websites/blogs, those who are running larger websites or e-commerce should take into consideration the fact that Premium SSL comes with seals, extended validation options and warranty values between $10,000 and $1,500,000.
How do I install a Let’s Encrypt Certificate?
To enable Let’s Encrypt on any of your hosted domain names, please contact support.
This is the day I’ve been waiting for. I’ve been a part of the closed beta but now I can apply the SSL to all of my websites. Thanks to all folks at GreenGeeks for implementing Let’s Encrypt!
One question, is it enabled in the CPanel?
I logged into cpanel and am looking at SSL/TLS. Doesn’t say “Free”. It sounds as daunting as ever to me. I haven’t investigated what this note means,
“Note: You do not have a dedicated IP address. As a result, web browsers that do not support SNI will probably give false security warnings to your users when they access any of your SSL websites. Microsoft® Internet Explorer™ on Windows XP™ is the most widely used web browser that does not support SNI.”
Hi Carol, to enable Let’s Encrypt certificates on any of your hosted domain names, please contact support
At this time it is not enabled via the control panel. You will need to continue to e-mail into our support to have it enabled. More updates to come.
Kaumil, thanks for the update. I just requested it for 6 of my sites. Figure I’ll do them in small chunks.
Sounds good 🙂
great news!!!
I was already researching other places for hosting 🙂
Now you won’t have to 🙂 Thank you for choosing GreenGeeks Fabio!
kpfz.org — Drupal 7 — low traffic. Will any internal links/old bookmarks to http://kpfz.org automatically redirect/rewrite to https ?
Alan,
You should be able to redirect HTTP to HTTPS by using .htaccess. Get in touch with our support and they’ll be able to help you out with this.
Great news for many of my hosting customers too! Thanks GreenGeeks!
Marni,
Your customers will love you for it. However, be sure to educate your customers on the differences between a Premium Wildcard SSL and a LetsEncrypt WildCard SSL as I mentioned at the bottom of my post! They’ll love you even more if you do that!
So glad to see free SSL support from GreenGeeks.
Noor, we’re glad to be able to offer it to you! 🙂
This is great news for us and our customers. Thank you!
You’re welcome 🙂
Hi, how long is the wait for SSL certificate? I Requested it more than 48 hours ago and still nothing. Quite disappointed to be honest.
Green Geeks installed Let’s Encrypt on most of our 15 sites. The problem is, we have SiteLock on all our sites and so far we are unable to use any of the certificates. As we use SiteLock for security, our record points to SiteLock and not Green Geeks. I am told by GG that the records must point to their servers in order to use SSL. And even tho GG recommends SiteLock, we have been unable to resolve this problem after contacting GG and SiteLock.
Support for this problem has been less than acceptable and we will not be adding any more sites to GG.
Hi Echo. If you’d like to open a ticket or email support@ we would be happy to see what we can do. Ask for Ron or Will C.
If you have an existing ticket number you can also call and someone will assist.