SSL

NameCheap hosting will promise you "Free SSL" when you sign up for hosting, but it's a trap. What you get is actually the first year free, for a certificate that will cost you $9/year, plus all the frustration and developer time to manage renewals of that SSL certificate.

Let’sEncrypt, on the other hand, provides always-free SSL certificates. Many modern web hosting providers include SSL certificates from Let’sEncrypt, by default, with your new hosting plans.

Until NameCheap decides to get with the program, we'll need to manually configure our hosting accounts there to use Let’sEncrypt certificates, which can be a but of a pain. Here's how I did it for one of my sites recently.

Get access to the server

In order to install the certificate on the server, you will either need ssh access, or to run the "Terminal" application from within cPanel. You can find it in the "Advanced" section.