Installing a renewed certificate on hostgator shared server

Hello and thank you for your amazing (really amazing) service, i got a free certificate and I just wanted to ask 2 quick questions:

  1. i got my free ssl installed on my hostgator account (i paid them $10 for installing my free ssl on their server), after 90 days i have to renew my free cert - will i have (by then) to contact hostgator again and ask them to install the (renewed) certificate, then the same procedure over and over again every 90 days?
  2. I saw im my account that my certificate will expire on April 8th, 2018 - when is the earliest date that i will be qualify to renew it (i prefer not to wait for the last minute)?

Thanks a bunch!
Ziv

Yes, unfortunately Hostgator is one of the worst offenders for this, as you will indeed have to pay their $10 fee every time, so at a minimum, $40 a year (if you do wait til the last minute.) For that reason, it's usually cheaper to pay for 1-year validity commercial certificates instead, or switch away from Hostgator, and tell them why you're leaving if you do.

You can renew at any point, technically, as long as you don't break the rate limit of 5 identical certificates per week, or 20 certificates per base domain per week. Typically, the recommendation is to renew every 60 days, so you have a month to figure out anything super broken. Of course, with Hostgator, this would mean that you would end up paying $60/year in support fees. =\

Thank you Jared,
I actually just talked to an hostgator agent, she told me clearly that there will NOT be additional $10 fee for any future renewal, its only a one time $10 and all future renewals (for the same domain) will be for no extra cost.
However, I will need to create a ticket 4 times a year asking them to install the renewed certificate for me…

Well that’s progress, at least! Glad to hear they’re making it at least slightly less painful, even if you do have to repeat a manual process several times a year. :wink:

Basically now the amount of tickets (per year) i will need to create is totally in relation to the expiration periods I get from lets encrypt… now its every 3 months but if (hopefully) at some point in the future they will change the expiration period of the free ssl to 6 or even 12 months - this will immediately reduce the amount of tickets i will have to create on hostgator :yum:

It's much more likely that the expiration period will be reduced than that it will be increased. See this very long thread on the subject:

UPDATE: seems that i did not get hostgator’s agent right… they told me today (by email) that they WILL chage $10 not only for the first ssl installation but also for each renewed certificate… meaning $40 a year + the need to cobtact them 4 times a year and ask for this manual action… no thank you…not for me at all! HOWEVER, i was just told by a collegue that with siteground.com not only that it does not cost $ to install lets encrypt certs but it will also be AUTO renew every 90 days, meaning no need to manually renew it at all, a site can have active ssl for years without any requiered action by the site owner! Is the above possible or its just fake?

Yes, it's possible. There are several shared hosting providers that provide automatic Let's Encrypt integration including automated renewals:

Siteground is on that list, so it looks like your colleague is correct.

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