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Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure there are letsencrypt windows clients. Which you can run every week to make sure they auto-renew. And you could do this as well by running the VM regularly, automatically.

The point of letsencrypt is to have auto-renewed certificates. It's intended to force you to automate the process.

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I can't run those scripts. My site runs on shared hosting, I don't have command line access. All I have is a file manager for my 'htdocs' and standard cpanel stuff.

So... this is less an issue with Let's Encrypt and more an issue with restrictions imposed by cPanel and your choice of host.

In fact isn't shared hosting the most common type of hosting? Any larger sites can afford paid certs anyways so letsencrypt is especially suited for smaller sites like mine, that can't afford the cert but also don't have the luxury of a dedicated machine/vps.

You're right that it's a pain for users trying to do it themselves, but some shared hosters already offer integrated LE, like DreamHost[1]; hopefully most will, if users push for it.

[1] https://www.dreamhost.com/hosting/ssl-tls-certificates/

@Achshar: VPSes have gotten exceptionally affordable lately. DO and AWS -- some of the current market leaders for cloud instances -- both offer reasonably-performant setups with high uptime for about $5/month, and that includes command-line access.

I'd argue that among people who know about Let's Encrypt, VPS hosting is more popular than cPanel-style shared hosting.

I am a tiny single person company, VPS require a ton of setup and maintenance (for me, a noob). Believe me, I tried. I bought a vps with the intention to move over, but it was too much. I am not a unix user, I can manage xampp, but installing and making changes via command line, setting up php/mysql/apache/whatever else is more work than I get paid for. Something that just works is far more preferable to me as a college student.

Don't switch. I got a VPS for my personal site and projects a year or two ago (after 15 years of shared hosting) and if you're not comfortable on the Linux command line your server will get owned and be part of a botnet before a week is up.

FWIW, cPanel just announced Let's Encrypt integration with their AutoSSL feature: https://blog.cpanel.com/announcing-cpanel-whms-official-lets...

Several shared hosting services offer native support for Let's Encrypt now. One of many lists: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/web-hosting-who-support-...

It looks like current versions of CPanel now have native support for Let's Encrypt: https://features.cpanel.net/topic/provide-support-for-lets-e...

Either change host or automate submission of cpanel's certificate. This could need modifying an ACME client. It might mean letsencrypt is not ready for you (yet).

I'd wait for your host to update its cPanel (unless you absolutely need https, then I'd either change hosts or buy a certificate elsewhere).

Even if you do not have command line, you probably have ftp or sftp access. If you search for filezilla in your share hosting forums, you will probably find the protocol and url.

Yeah I have FTP. But can I install certs via ftp? I mean yeah sure I guess since they are just files but won't that be like too much work? Knowing what to put where and how. cPanel is a lot simpler. Paste cert and private key, press submit.

It's not a huge time investment to learn how to do something like FTPing a cert (much less so for someone getting a Masters in Computers). Your time would be much better spent learning how to do it than spam replying "I don't have the time to learn" all over the thread. /rant

get a better hosting environment.

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