Hello, I’m sorry I’m new here, but our certificate expires on March 24 and, without any of the info on how our former webmaster (literally MIA, gone from the internet) got it or anything we don’t know what to do. I would greatly appreciate any help anyone can provide! Thank you!
Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. Note: you must provide your domain name to get help. Domain names for issued certificates are all made public in Certificate Transparency logs (e.g. https://crt.sh/?q=example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.
I think you should contact Siteground support and explain your situation. In any case, you’re going to need to get ahold of some administrative credentials so that you can do administrative tasks on your server—or so that you can pass them on to a new web developer whom you may hire in the future.
Once you have some information about what kind of hosting plan and software environment your site uses, and once you have credentials that let you administer it, you can feel free to come back here and get some advice about renewing certificates for your particular environment. The way of doing this is quite different depending on what software you use and how you administer the site.
I’m glad you’re paying attention to this promptly, but I don’t think you have much to worry about from the certificate expiration. Let’s Encrypt certificate renewals are free of charge from Let’s Encrypt’s side and usually take only a few seconds or a few minutes, depending on the software tools that are used. Also, many setups will renew the certificate for you automatically when it’s 30 days or less from expiry, so there’s a fairly high chance, though not a certainty, that your certificate may get renewed automatically without any specific action on your part on February 23 (30 days before March 24 of this year).
Credentials for Let's Encrypt are usually stored in a file somewhere in /etc and not directly used by a human being; instead, they're used by the software that interacts with Let's Encrypt.
These credentials are also not ultimately very important because any Let's Encrypt application can easily create new ones for free at any time if needed. The important thing is making sure that there is software installed on your system that's configured to renew the certificate automatically when necessary. As @JuergenAuer indicated, it looks like that's probably true for your setup!
Thank you both so, so much. I don’t know how to verify that there’s a software that does this, but I will check again on the date you mentions. Thanks again!