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The most important thing about Let’s Encrypt
David Janik
David Janik
Updated 10/24/2023 – 4 min. reading
Blog
A short summary
Let ‘s Encrypt is a certification authority that has set itself the goal of securing the World Wide Web . Human: Deploying a certificate on a website used to be complicated and expensive.
Mozilla founders Josh Aas and
Eric Rescorla knew this and tried to figure out a way to change it.
The biggest problem was complexity and cost. So they simply automated the whole process, and they did it for free . Web hosting companies, including us, caught on to this and suddenly everyone wanted to offer free and one-click HTTPS.
“We were the first web hosting provider in the Czech specific database by industry Republic with which you could have Let’s Encrypt! :-)”
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And they succeeded in their goal of 1+ , within a few years the number of websites running on HTTPS has skyrocketed and is now more than 50% of all websites. Certificates were mainly installed on websites that did not have any before.
Why is Let’s Encrypt worth it?
For several reasons.
You will ensure the trust of your visitors thanks to the security of your website . By installing the certificate, traffic between the visitor and the web server will be encrypted. Thus, an attacker cannot intercept any data they exchange. Well, he can, but it won’t do him any good if he doesn’t crack the encryption.
Search engines like Google or Seznam support encryption, and websites that run on HTTPS will be preferred over others . So, from the SEO point of view, the certificate pays off.
Simplicity thanks to automation . Certbot makes the implementation on the server and the subsequent management much easier. The certificate is even regenerated every 3 months.
Let’s Encrypt also supports the so-called Wild certificate, so you can have up to 100 subdomains secured under one domain.
It’s free.
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Certbot
It’s a bot written in Python that helps implement TLS/SSL certificates for a web server. It can automatically configure a web server to run over HTTPS. For Apache, it can automate security steps and enable various features.
It is supported by the EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation .
How is it different from other certificates?
It depends on which one. There are several types of certificates, but in the main one, such as data encryption, they are almost identical.
They differ mainly in functionality. E.g. The EV (Extended Validation) certificate will show you the company name directly in the command line.
Another extended certificate is the so-called Wildcard, which can secure all subdomains below the main domain of the 2nd order. You order them as: *.namedomain.cz and the certificate ensures an unlimited number of subdomains.
But even here Let’s Encrypt is breaking through. You can secure up to 100 subdomains under one certificate! This is perfectly sufficient for an ordinary mortal.
How do I install Let’s Encrypt?
Web hosting
We already automatically install Let’s Encrypt on all of our created web hosting.
This guide is useful when you want to regenerate it, e.g. for a new subdomain.
Just log in to our customer center and go to the list of domains .
You choose the domain for which you want to install the certificate and click on Domain management and this menu appears:
You choose HTTPS Let’s Encrypt, where you can usa cfo regenerate the certificate, for example, for a new subdomain.
Troubleshooting
If the certificate fails to generate, it could be for one of the following reasons:
The domain MUST point to the IP address of our hosting before activating the certificate
You have a redirect set in htaccess somewhere else
Virtual servers
We smuggled Certbot into our VPS Center and thus comment configurer google analytics ? also onto our virtual or dedicated servers.
Thanks to this, you can generate a free HTTPS certificate for all domains on your server. Just activate the domain and go to the Settings section .
Where you will see a table where you can act ivate the certificate incl. of all subdomains.
The certificate should be generated within 30 minutes.