I don’t know anything about servers, i am on wordpress cloud shared hosting and i enabled Let’s Encrypt with a click of a button in the control panel. 90 days later my multisite is not accessible via https. It has been like this for over 24 hours. My host kept telling me different things i had to do to allow renewal and I’m still waiting. I was instructed to:
change https to http in myphpadmin for home and site url
check domains and aliases are pointing to the correct ip
delete the www.static and static. aliases
I’m hoping this means it will work again soon, I have up to another 4 hours to wait apparently.
All I really want to know is what can I can do 90 days from now to avoid this again please?
Many thanks
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My domain is:
I ran this command:
It produced this output:
My web server is (include version):
The operating system my web server runs on is (include version):
My hosting provider, if applicable, is: TSO Host
I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don’t know):
I’m using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel):
I think under these circumstances you are pretty reliant on the host and you’ll need to get them to look into your situation and give you accurate advice that applies to you individually.
When certificates are provided by a host using a control panel (which is often a great way to arrange things), the host then bears most responsibility for ensuring that this will work and keep working for all of the users.
We may be able to give you a little more information about what’s going on if you can tell us your domain name.
I believe the host is still in the best position to help you, especially since you feel you don’t know much about server administration. Sorry for the inconvenience.
For the future, a lot of software either performs or recommends a renewal at the 60-day mark, 30 days before the certificate expires. If this doesn’t happen, you then have 30 days to investigate why not, rather than confronting an expired certificate. Let’s Encrypt should have sent you a warning e-mail at some point indicating that the certificate wasn’t renewed, but that warning might have been sent to your web host instead of to you if their tools are configured to use their e-mail address instead of yours, so you might not have seen it for that reason.
You could consider subscribing to a third-party monitoring service that lets you know if you have a certificate that is near expiry. One that was built by a community member on this forum (but isn’t a service of Let’s Encrypt itself) is
Thank you for your detailed reply. It is very much appreciated.
The 3 steps they made me take to do with https to http redirect, ip adresses and static aliases, are they all valid reasons/steps in order for it renew?
Am I understanding correctly that if I had taken these steps before expiry date then I may have been able to avoid this problem. My host told me there was nothing I could do prior to expiry which doesn’t seem right.
These are my last questions to you, I have taken up enough of your time. Thanks again
We recommend that all certificates be renewed 30 days before expiry, specifically to give people a chance to look into the problem if the renewal fails somehow. While we can’t require that web hosts implement this recommendation, I would consider it suspicious if the web host couldn’t have renewed your certificate 30 days ago.
Without access to more logs and technical information about why the renewal failed, it’s hard for me to say whether the other instructions they gave you were useful or not, or why the renewal is currently not working. We have been able to help many people resolve issues of this kind here on this forum, but we most often had to see at least the exact error message from the certificate authority, which it doesn’t seem that your hosting environment is sharing with you.
If they can’t fix things but can share more technical details about the reason for the failure, you can also feel free to share those details here and then we might be able to advise you better.