I know a number of folks who have shared my excitement at seeing support for the Let’s Encrypt project grow as the timeline towards a public beta inched closer and closer. Let’s Encrypt is a new certificate authority backed by a wide variety of sponsored organizations including big names like Mozilla, Google, the EFF, and Facebook. Their mission is to help secure the web by offering freely available TLS certificates. But why is this important?
Having an SSL certificate has been a traditionally cumbersome process of creating signing requests, storing private keys, verifying authority through domain records, and configuring Apache accordingly (not to mention there was typically a cost involved to this). There are a variety of reasons to do it that go well beyond getting a green padlock in your browser. When you login to website and interact with them over standard HTTP that traffic is easily monitored by others on your network. With our goal of helping users reclaim their digital identity and build out a space on the web, it only makes sense to provide the necessary tools to allow them to do that securely. In addition browsers have begun proposing plans to deprecate standard HTTP and display warnings in the browser.
Let’s Encrypt opened their public beta this past December and we’re pleased to finally announce a working solution that gives everyone immediate availability to install these certificates completely free of charge directly from their cPanel. All Reclaim Hosting customers will find a Let’s Encrypt icon under the Security section of cPanel. Receiving and installing a certificate is as easy as the click of a button. During the beta period certificates expire after 90 days, however using our tool certificates will automatically renew for you in the background every 60 days ensuring you never have to worry about an expired certificate again. You can read more about the process at http://docs.www.reclaimhosting.com/miscellaneous/installing-free-ssl-certificates.
Providing secure spaces to host your content is at the core of Reclaim Hosting’s mission and we believe this integration with Let’s Encrypt goes a long way towards a more secure and safe environment for us all.
