I’m hosted on a shared hosting plan with GoDaddy for my website WheresTheDance.com
I have no SSH access. Can I install a certificate through any manual method?
You can obtain a certificate, yes.
Installing it, I’m less sure about. Do you have a control panel on your GoDaddy account, which enables you to upload / install SSL certs ? (someone more familiar with GoDaddy may know that if you don’t ). If you do have that, then there are several options for obtaining a certificate.
Looking at GoDaddy, it depends on your shared hosting plan. If it’s cPanel or Plesk then yes. If it’s Web & Classic Hosting, website builder or other GoDaddy website application, then they don’t support it.
Try as I might, it seems that there is no option for LetsEncrypt in this situation. Dang.
Supposedly I need a UCC SSL for whatever that is worth. And this must be purchased through GoDaddy.
which hosting plan do you have ?
It’s certainly within Go Daddy’s right to attach the purchase of certificates to their cheaper hosting products. Obviously when it comes time to renew you might want to consider whether a host that throws in certificates from Let’s Encrypt or another provider is a better deal (some cPanel hosts give you a free Comodo cert)
BTW: UCC stands for Universal Communications Certificate, it’s Microsoft’s preferred term for what is also sometimes called a SAN (Subject Alternative Name) certificate, but whatever you call them they’re basically one certificate for several different host names. Every exact host name for a site needs to be in the certificate, so if you had a certificate just for www.example.com and a visitor tries to access https://example.com/ the certificate won’t match, and they’ll get an error, even if all you intended to do was give them a redirect to https://www.example.com/. But you can put lots of names in a certificate if you want, like maybe images.example.com and mail.example.com, or completely unrelated names for different sites you run, like haddock.example and www.example.org. Having a separate certificate for every single name would be a huge pain in the backside. Let’s Encrypt (of course) offers SAN / UCC certificates, so does basically everybody.
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