Yes.
These are silly domains that host marketing landing pages, but of course they need to be live and working.
I've managed to hack together something again it seems.
I originally tried this command, as I had saved it in my notes from previous attempt as what should work in 3 months when cert expired.
certbot certonly --webroot -w /var/www/html -d pulsenews.online -d www.pulsenews.online -d dailytrends.digital -d www.dailytrends.digital -d dailypulse.online -d www.dailypulse.online
This produced the DNS error and 'unauthorized error'.
One of these domains isn't being used nor pointing correctly to the server so I believe that's what happened. I removed it and re tried the command
certbot certonly --webroot -w /var/www/html -d pulsenews.online -d www.pulsenews.online -d dailypulse.online -d www.dailypulse.online
This seemed to work and created a new cert for these.
The original expired within the hour, and all sites had errors and went dead.
I remembered the 000-default-le-ssl.conf file, and edited it, it was pointing to the old CERT still, so I modified it to the new directory. ( xxxxxxx-0001)
Tried to restart apache, which produced another warning (no domain found, servername, 127.0.0.1 something something) but seems to have reloaded regardless. And now everything seems ok.
Also the domain i omitted, seems to somehow have been included and updated as well.
clearly this is not the best way to go about this, and I'll have to remember all this in 90 days or sooner. I'd love to know the proper way to do it should I ever start over on a new server....