If not, do you know of a free site where I can create an SSL that does work with GoDaddy? I just finished an exhausting 3 months working on my 3rd website using GoDaddy’s website builder and am not in the position to create new sites on another platform right now as my income has been cut by 3/4 and I’m working 18hr. days to increase my income and don’t have time to recreate my websites - am dancing as fast as I can to survive.
They’re simple sites but still take a great deal of time…
If you have any advice for me I would greatly appreciate it.
GoDaddy does not have built-in Let’s Encrypt support. If you have a VPS plan, you are able to install certbot and make this work, but if you are on the much more common shared hosting plans, your only recourse is to use a web-based service like ZeroSSL to manually generate your certificates and then paste the output into the GoDaddy control panel. This would need to be done about every three months, as Let’s Encrypt certificates have a 90-day validity period.
One thing to consider is that moving a simple website is actually quite easy. It’s really just a matter of taking the files from your web directory of one host and putting them on another host. When you get a chance, I’d look into it if I were you. (In the near future, I’m actually planning to move the site for a nonprofit I support for the same reason.)
When you say moving the files over… can they be moved directly from the GoDaddy library in a lump or even one at a time or do I have to hunt and peck for ea. one in various folders on my computer and then resize… that’d be crazy-time-consuming?
VPS vs. shared hosting - I don’t know what VPS is but I’m pretty sure I’d be the shared hosting (using their website builder).
What about designing the pages - how would that convert over?
Or is there an easy way to copy what I have on GoDaddy? Like a mirror image and then just replace the actual pieces one at a time rather than re-designing the layout in the new software??? Just riffing here.
(I’m thinking WordPress is the way to go… would you agree? I’m hesitant because there’s no human support. Any better ideas?
Computers are generally really great at automating things so that you don't have to do things manually like this. I sometimes feel sad when I read that someone spent two or three hours telling a computer to do the same thing to hundreds of files, one after another. Usually there is a command or tool that would tell the computer to take care of that entire repetitive task—it's one of the things computers do best!
I regularly copy lots of files from one places to another on my computer (or one computer to another) using various tools, and when I do that I don't have to select or choose the individual files to be copied or transferred; i can just say "this entire folder/directory and everything within it". So I believe the answer is ultimately yes.
The choices involved might be a bit daunting, especially since there are now dozens of options, but we do have a list on this forum of "Web hosting who support Let's Encrypt"
which collects various kinds of web hosts that support Let's Encrypt in various ways by making it convenient (and normally free of charge) to get, install, and renew a Let's Encrypt certificate so as to allow secure HTTPS connections to customers' sites.
