Please can you help my website is now hard for people to access as the SSL certificate expired. From the cPanel information it says that I need to contact Lets Encrypt as the issuer of the certificate.
The domain name is https://www.bveccs.com.au/
Please help!
There’s no need to contact Let’s Encrypt strictly speaking, you will have to do the actual renewal (it’s handled automatically, no people!)
Do you know how this certificate was issued previously? Using a cPanel extension? Using a command line tool?
What steps have you taken, and what has been the exact result of those steps? Copying and pasting messages/screenshots helps us help you!
Thanks so much for replying so quickly. This is no my area of expertise. All I have done so far is log into cPanel and got the information that is below.
Ah! Ok, so that’s a generic message that the certificate is expired, as opposed to a renewal error. The certificate for this site was issued July 30th, and Let’s Encrypt certificates have a 90-day validity period, which means somehow you’ll have to renew it at least that often. Recommended is 60 days after issuance, so there’s no scramble if you have issues.
I’m going to assume that you’re not the one who issued this certificate in the first place. If you are, try and think about how you issued it a few months ago and we can work on helping with an automated process from there.
What sort of server is running here? Linux/Windows, nginx/apache/something else? Do you have console access, or only cPanel?
No you are right I did not issue the certificate (nothing to do with me, just trying to help out as when I tried to open the website just from Googling this morning had to go through two screens. Now I can get it but maybe that was because I already managed to open it before, so not sure if other people can access the website easily). Now I can get in and just have the message below which is fine - also possible someone else has helped out but doubt it as it should not have the not secure on it.
I am not a web developer only SEO and all I have access to is the cpanel and back end of the website. Have not had a reply from the web developer and don’t know if she has the certificate issued either as there was another group involved earlier on as well… The owner of the business asked me to help so thus she does not know either. Please can you help me out?
Hi, could you please help further? This problem is quite urgent as the people find the screen below when they try to access this website so there will be little to no traffic for this business until this issue is sorted, please if you can give some advice that would be appreciated.
@ktbveccs, since this is such an urgency, the first thing I would recommend doing is getting a certificate in place, and then we can worry about automating the process so this doesn’t happen again. The easiest way to do that without in-depth knowledge of the server is to use one of the browser-based clients; I recommend https://zerossl.com/free-ssl/#crt
Here, the easiest way is to use HTTP verification, which will require you to place a specially named text file (with specific contents) in the .well-known/acme-challenge directory on your web server. So, if the file was named abcdef, you would need to have it so that the file can be loaded by navigating to `http://www.bveccs.com.au/.well-known/acme-challenge/abcdef. (If there’s an SSL redirect and you see a certificate warning, that’s ok. Let’s Encrypt will still retrieve the challenge file.)
To do that on ZeroSSL, you will need to enter an email and the list of domains you wish to get the certificate for. I would be sure to use all the domains listed on that original certificate. Note that each domain will get it’s own challenge file. Make sure they’re all accessible at the right URLs! After this, it will generate an account key that you should save. We’ll just hang on to this for now until we get the immediate problem sorted - it’s not critical for anything. After that, you will be provided the challenge files to upload. Make sure you pay attention to the period in front of well-known, a lot of people miss that. You’ll probably need to create these directories wherever you would normally add files to the server and then upload the challenge files.
Once all the files are there, you can tell ZeroSSL you’re ready, and it will instruct Let’s Encrypt to initiate the challenge. If all goes well, you’ll be presented with the certificate, private key, and CA chain. You should have a place on cPanel to paste the contents of these files, which will install the new certificate!
I’m off to bed now, but let us know if you have any issues and hopefully someone else can jump in!
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