by Mark JohnsonNo Comments
  1. Go to https://zerossl.com/
  2. Click on online tools.
  3. Click on start, under “FREE SSL Certificate Wizard”.
  4. On the right-hand side, you have a field called “Domains”, add your domains to this. Include mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com. (Don’t include HTTP:// or https://).
  5. Accept the zerossl TOS & let’s encrypt SA by adding check marks.
  6. Hit the next button in the top right corner.
  7. Zerossl will generate the CSR (Certificate Signing Request). Loading might take some time.
  8. Once it’s done, click on the download button, to have a backup and click “Next” again.
  9. It’s going to start generating Account Key (Again might take a few minutes).
  10. Once done, download the Account Key and click on “Next” button.
  11. The new page will appear. This is how Letsencrypt will know that you own the domain.
  12. Download the two txt files.
  13. Head to your cPanel and click on “File manager” and go to your root folder.
  14. On root, create new folder .well-known and inside it create an acme-challenge folder. So your path should look like:
    mydomain.com/.well-known/acme-challenge
    Please note: You can just delete the .txt files you put in the /.well-known/acme-challenge once you are done, but keep the folders. You will need them in 90 days again.If the file .well-known does not show after making it. Just do the following, when opening the File Manager select to show all hidden files & folders that start with “.” (dot) as well! Or just type “public_html/.well-known/acme-challenge” into the left menu and click “Go”. If you are having issues with finding root directory.
    Jobb added a comment with a better explanation:The first time you use File Manager in GoDaddy, it defaults to the “home” directory, which I found out is NOT the same as the “root” directory. Installing .well-known/acme-challenge in the home directory does not work.In the screenshot above, it shows domainname.com/.well-known/acme-challenge as the path, but again that’s misleading for shared domains. There is an /etc/domainname.com folder, but if you put .well-known/acme-challenge underneath that folder, it also does not work.

    With a little digging, I discovered that GoDaddy considers the /public_html folder the “root” folder, so you want to create the subfolders in there so it looks like /public_html/.well-known/acme-challenge. THAT path finally worked.

  15. Upload the two .txt files (from point 12) inside the acme-challenge folder. Great tip from Rubab in the comments:
    As we downloaded two text files in step 7 & 8 , and the files that I downloaded on Step 12 weren’t really ‘text’ files but were simple files with no extension. So, when Step 15 asked to put 2 text files into .well-known/acme-challenge, I put the previous files there; that is why it was not validating the keys.
  16. Go back to zerossl, and click on the link
  17. If it returns you a page with numbers & characters, you are good to go. If not then check that the URL path contains mydomain.com/.well-known/acme-challenge and that the sting of numbers & words are the same as on zerossl.
  18. Click on “next”.
  19. Voila! Your Certificate is ready now, scroll down and download the CRT & Private key.

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