Installed Certbot now site doesn't load

Help
1

My domain is: www.romneymarshguitar.co.uk

I ran this command:

It produced this output:

My web server is (include version): Server version: Apache/2.4.38 (Debian)
Server built: 2021-12-21T16:50:43

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): Debian

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: Fasthosts

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don't know): yes

I'm using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel): no

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you're using Certbot): 2.7.4

I installed cerbot as per the instructions on their site, and now my site doesn't run. All ports are open 443/80, and the sites-enabled conf files seem correct (I verified them with Grok and Claude).

I can curl from the server:

curl -I https://www.romneymarshguitar.co.uk
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:45:12 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.38 (Debian)
Last-Modified: Fri, 01 Mar 2024 16:26:25 GMT
ETag: "3d98-6129bd656c55a"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 15768
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html

But it hangs when I try it from my local machine, implying that the server is not setup correctly. I can no longer get to http:// either (due to an assumed redirect).

What's happened?

TIA.

2

Hi! http works just fine from my end:

$ curl -v http://www.romneymarshguitar.co.uk/
* Host www.romneymarshguitar.co.uk:80 was resolved.
* IPv6: (none)
* IPv4: 88.208.240.21
*   Trying 88.208.240.21:80...
* Connected to www.romneymarshguitar.co.uk (88.208.240.21) port 80
* using HTTP/1.x
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: www.romneymarshguitar.co.uk
> User-Agent: curl/8.12.1
> Accept: */*
> Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip, br, zstd
>
* Request completely sent off
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2025 13:07:20 GMT
< Server: Apache/2.4.38 (Debian)
< Last-Modified: Fri, 01 Mar 2024 16:26:25 GMT
< ETag: "3d98-6129bd656c55a-gzip"
< Accept-Ranges: bytes
< Vary: Accept-Encoding
< Content-Encoding: gzip
< Content-Length: 3979
< Content-Type: text/html
<
<!DOCTYPE html>
[…]

Connection timeout usually happens due to firewalls.

3

Thank you. It's bizarre. I'm getting certain pages loading, and other not loading. I've sent the same links to a friend for him to try from elsewhere, and the ones that are loading for me, are not loading for him...and vice versa. I think there's some kind of 443 redirect left hanging around (as I've tried my best to undo what Certbot did).

4

I should've been more clear and complete in my assessment: I also get a timeout on port 443, but port 80 is intact, as I said. And I don't recall timeouts ever happening due to "redirects". (Perhaps some people would call port forwarding a "redirect" but that would be wrong in my book, a wrong port forward could result in timeouts.)

2 Likes
5

Sorry, I also should have been more clear. I meant that when someone connects on port 80, it was redirecting to https. I think, I've managed to get back to where I was now (simply running on port 80 with no cert), but the browser is adding the "s" to https by default and of course that's failing.

I'm starting to wish I'd just told my users to remove the "s" if a browser adds it :stuck_out_tongue:

6

Just check your firewall(s) for port 443.. All the firewalls. Sometimes it's necessary to open up the firewall on the VPS and somewhere in the hosting providers panel.

2 Likes