
Safety and security is a vital aspect to consider when hosting your website on the internet. It is necessary that your website should be hosted through a strong, reliable and managed hosting platform.
Cloudways is one such Cloud Hosting Platform that gives its customers super fast hosting stack to host their websites.
There are some add-ons and tools on Cloudways that you can use to integrate with your managed cloud servers to optimize and secure your site over the internet. We have been receiving a lot of feedback from our valued users where they have demanded the integration of Let’s Encrypt, an Open-Source Certification Authority.
Your feedback is our most valued asset! Owing to the overwhelming requests for Let’s Encrypt, we, at Cloudways, have integrated the certification authority inside our Cloud Platform. It is now available for users to deploy and safeguard their websites on the cloud with SSL/TLS certificates.
What Is Let’s Encrypt?
Let’s Encrypt is an automated, free and open certification authority. Launched under the flag of Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), it has issued certificates for more than 2.4 million different domains across the globe. This milestone took only 16 months to achieve.
There is a good reason for it to be successful. The brains from Akamai, Cisco, Mozilla Foundation, and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) took the initiative of creating a reliable, easy-to-use certificate authority. ISRG now has some serious support from Google Chrome, Sucuri, Facebook, and Vultr.
Benefits of Using Let’s Encrypt Certificates
Integration of Traditional SSL certificates to your website can become rather costly for maturing online business, whereas, free certificates do not guarantee absolute protection. Let’s Encrypt SSL curtails your concerns by giving you a trusted certificate that fulfills all your HTTPS requirements free. Don’t worry about your SSL certificate’s expiry because Let’s Encrypt executes automated certificate renewals. Your certificates won’t ever go invalid and save you the hassle of reissuing, renewing and re-configuring of SSL certificates on your domains.
Let’s Encrypt SSL gives you domain-validated security certificates which are certified by the open certificate authority (CA). It makes encryption easy for your specific domains and, resultingly, web browsing is more stable and secure. Cloudways proudly supports Let’s Encrypt as a security certificate provider for your website. Here are a few advantages of using Let’s Encrypt certificates:
- Free of cost
- Easy to integrate
- Minimized validation email hassles
- No dedicated IP required
- Trusted by almost all the key browsers in the world
- Auto-renewable
How to Install Let’s Encrypt SSL on Cloudways Managed Servers
I am assuming here that you have already created a server at Cloudways. Now, to install Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate, you simply need to follow these steps.
Step 1: Login to Cloudways Platform and provide your credentials
Step 2: Click on Applications from the top bar.
Step 3: Select your desired application and under Application Management tab, Select SSL certificate.
Installing a New SSL Certificate
To install a new SSL certificate, you have to scroll down through the Application Management tab and navigate to the SSL Certificate section and expand it. Navigate to Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate option. Provide the required details and click “Install.”
Please ensure that your domain is live from your Cloudways server and DNS registration has been completed for your website. Otherwise, the SSL certificate will not be installed.
The process of SSL certificate installation takes a few minutes. Once activated, your website will start functioning on HTTPs protocol. Once installed, you can verify your SSL Certification by just visiting any online SSL checker platform and enter your domain name. This will ensure your SSL certificate verification.
Manually Renew Let’s Encrypt Certificate
By default, the auto-renew option for your installed Let’s Encrypt certificate is enabled inside the Platform. Your installed certificate renews after every three months. However, if for some reason your certificate fails to renew automatically or you prefer to renew it by yourself, then you can use the on-demand renewal option. To know more about how to use the on-demand renewal option, have a look at this Let’s Encrypt knowledge base tutorial.
Final Thoughts
So step right up and become a part of a managed cloud hosting platform such as Cloudways. With just a few clicks you can get “Let’s Encrypt” encryption for your website through its user-friendly Managed Cloud Hosting Platform. Activate the FREE SSL authority and start browsing the web without worrying about security.
Owais Khan
Owais works as a Marketing Manager at Cloudways (managed hosting platform) where he focuses on growth, demand generation, and strategic partnerships. With more than a decade of experience in digital marketing and B2B, Owais prefers to build systems that help teams achieve their full potential.