Issued automatically
When your domain resolves to our server, a certificate is requested, installed and turned on. You never generate a signing request or paste a private key.
SSL certificates
The padlock,
included and automatic
Every site hosted with us gets a certificate issued the moment your domain points here, renewed for as long as you stay. There is nothing to buy.
Renewed for you
Certificates last 90 days. Ours renew at 60 with no involvement from you — the single most common cause of a site going "not secure" simply cannot happen here.
Redirects to HTTPS
Once the certificate is live we can force every http request to https, so an old link or a bookmark still lands on the secure version.
Being straight with you
Why we do not sell SSL certificates
Plenty of hosts sell an SSL certificate as a yearly line item. For an ordinary website that is selling something the customer can get free, and we would rather say so than take the money.
A domain-validated certificate — the kind that produces the padlock and encrypts the connection — is issued free by Let's Encrypt, and browsers trust it exactly as much as a paid one. The encryption is identical. There is no "stronger" padlock to buy.
Paid certificates do still exist for two real cases: organisation and extended validation, where a certificate authority verifies your company's legal identity and that appears in the certificate detail, and wildcard certificates across large numbers of subdomains. Banks and listed companies buy those. If you need one, ask us and we will install it at cost — we will not mark it up.
If your site is not showing the padlock, it is almost always that
the domain is not pointing at us yet. Check the nameservers in your panel,
then retry SSL from the site's page — it takes about thirty seconds.
Common questions
No. A visitor sees the same padlock and the same "connection is secure" panel. The difference only appears if somebody opens the certificate detail and reads the issuer, which essentially nobody does.
Each subdomain you add in the panel gets its own certificate, issued the same way. shop.yourdomain.co.uk and blog.yourdomain.co.uk are both covered without you doing anything.
Yes. Send us the certificate, the private key and the intermediate bundle and we will install it. Ordinary support, no charge.
No. On HTTP/2 — which we run — an encrypted connection is usually faster than an unencrypted one, because the protocol only negotiates over TLS. The handshake cost is a few milliseconds, once.