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Matthew Dailey
Matthew Dailey

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How to add free SSL certificate to GoDaddy shared hosting

I began researching adding a SSL certificate to my personal website after founding out Google would start flagging HTTP sites as 'not secure' back in 2018. Naturally GoDaddy offers their own SSL certificate for 79 dollars a year. You can install your own SSL certificate but GoDaddy offers very little help. I called them to ask questions about how to do it and they tried to discourage me from going on my own. The customer support rep reminded me if I install my own SSL certificate I would have to  manually renew it every 90 days. This was after they said they weren't sure if it was possible on my plan. The rep was correct about the manual renewal although a CRON job can be set up to automatically renew the certificate.

After going through multiple tutorials that didn't apply to my particular situation I found an easy-to-follow post by Steve Phillips. It covered everything on how to install a SSL certificate on GoDaddy shared hosting using a Windows machine and even how to have the certificate automatically renew. It can be found here. The hard part was enabling the SSH access and configuring PuTTy, an SSH client. I used a different way in generating the SSH keys than what is described in Steve Phillips' post. I used PuTTy's built-in key generator. I completed the entire process, including setting up PuTTy in about an hour.

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