Got Here From There

As I mentioned some time back, I had SSL certificates expiring last weekend for several sites I host at NameCheap.

After just paying for two years of hosting, and while paying for the renewals of domain registrations on a regular basis, I just wasn't going to cough up even more for something I could get free elsewhere.

But apparently NameCheap goes out of its way to make it hard to abandon their SSL for e.g. Let's Encrypt. Couldn't remove the NameCheap SSL certificates until they actually expired, which meant down time while installing the new ones.

And then the very nice tutorial I found for installing the Let's Encrypt SSLs ... didn't work. Why? I dunno. Followed the instructions on video multiple times but it never actually gave me the thing to install. My sites were "down" insofar as they were not accessible with https and the pretty lock icon.

I didn't have a Plan B until I suddenly recalled that it wasn't always this way: When I was at Hostgator, SSL "just worked" on my sites. Even though I didn't get Hostgator SSL certificates.

Why?

Because I used CloudFlare. When I switched to NameCheap hosting, that came with its own content delivery network and used LiteSpeed cache. No CloudFlare.

CloudFlare provides several varieties of SSL protection, including a free one.

So I put my sites back on CloudFlare, and a few minutes later they were SSL-encrypted again.

Pain in the ass, frankly. At this point, SSL ought to just be rolled into hosting plans as long as the domains are hosted at the same place they're registered. And I understand that's the case at some hosts. And I have two years to consider whether I plan to continue with NameCheap or look elsewhere.

Side note: Many times I've considered giving up on shared/cloud hosting and just renting a Virtual Private Server. But whenever I do the math on it, it doesn't work out very well. Most places want extra for providing my preferred front end (cPanel), and charge by bandwidth and storage. I don't use a LOT of either (and they're "unlimited"), and generally don't tax a shared hosting account beyond its CPU usage maximums ... but I'd pay three times as much for a VPS using the same amount of bandwidth/storage as I use. I suppose that may change eventually. If so, I'll probably spend the money for offshore hosting in a more privacy-friendly country like Iceland, too.