Shared hosting is the most cost saving shared hosting solution provided by any provider. Nowadays HTTPS has great importance in the terms of web security. To implement HTTPS we need SSL certificates to secure the website and web apps. Now SSL certificates are found over the World wide web and its is so cheap and most important thing is Lets encrypt provides these SSL certificates free of cost to the web properties.

It provides secure environment for your web property. It is very difficult to implement these feature in shared hosting. This tutorial provides Free SSL generation using Lets encrypt. You need a SSH connection in order to get the SSL certificates from your terminal and you need to add those free SSL certificates using your cpanel.

Prerequisites Steps:

  • You need to add  DNS A records to your DNS provider and domain name must be points towards your public server IP.
  • You need to use and enable the SSH manager to run the given commands on your shared hosting provider.
  • For SSH connection please refer Putty SSH Guide and login to SSH and run the given commands one by one.

Download  ACME PHP Let’s Encrypt SSL Client

Step-1 (Download the ACME PHP scripts to get the Lets encrypt SSL certificates)

Using curl 

$ curl https://github.com/acmephp/acmephp/releases/download/1.0.0-beta4/acmephp.phar

OR

Using wget 

$ curl https://github.com/acmephp/acmephp/releases/download/1.0.0-beta4/acmephp.phar

Step-2 (Register your email address with Lets Encrypt) 

$ php acmephp.phar register techbrown@hotmail.com

Step-3 (Prove that you are the owner of your domain) 

$ php acmephp.phar authorize techbrown.com

Step-4 (Check that your domain name is pointed towards to your server or not) 

$ php acmephp.phar check techbrown.com

Get Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates

Step-5 (Get your Free Lets Encrypt SSL certificate) 

$ php acmephp.phar request techbrown.com

Step-6 (Find your Free Lets Encrypt SSL certificates and private key and you need to note it down)

Full Chain Certificate 

$ cat ~/.acmephp/master/certs/techbrown.com/fullchain.pem

Certificate private key 

$ cat ~/.acmephp/master/private/techbrown.com/private.pem

Apply SSL Certificates to the Shared Hosting

Step-7 (Add your Free Lets Encrypt SSL certificates using your Cpanel)

Step-8 (Add cron job using cpanel to renew the certificates automatically)

Add the given lines to cronjob to renew your certificates automatically php acmephp.phar request techbrown.com

Congratulation now you have installed the Lets Encrypt Free SSL Certificate on shared hosting.