Arvixe shared hosting account no longer supports Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate

In my opinion Arvixe decision to block Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate on shared hosting is truly selfish. First I applaud Let’s Encrypt for allowing us website owners who prefer not to spend hundred of dollars per year secure our websites. This benefits consumers tremendously, as it protects users data. With the prevalence of hackers nowdays, security is considered top priority. Not only that, Google has implicated that websites with https has a slight boost in search ranking compared to http. It might not be a huge advantage, but it is an advantage nonetheless. Some web hosting companies have a feature that directly generate Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates automatically in cPanel. Their main priority is security, not profit from selling SSL certificates. That earns my respect. Multiple requests had been sent to Arvixe to support this feature, all rejected. We had to go through many hoops to use the Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate on our sites, still better than not having it. Now they have decided to block it entirely. Shameful in my opinion. Read my correspondence with them below. I will update the blog if there is further development. Jan 11, 2018
Email reply from Arvixe:
Hello, You have uploaded the Lets Encrypt SSL certificate in the file manager. We do not install Let’s Encrypt Certificates on shared server. Its form and function requires a level of support, which we do not. If you have purchased WildCard SSL from third party, then please upload it to the file manager and provide the location of it so that we will install it on our server. If you require additional assistance, please feel free to contact us. We are available 24×7.
My Response:
Hi, Is this a new policy? The previous certificate which expired recently was from Let’s Encrypt, and you allowed it before. Why is there a policy change? I really hate to change server because of this. To be honest, you should just enable the standard SSL functions within cpanel and we can take care of the certificates ourselves, no support needed. Not sure why the CSR and CRT features are disabled, even godaddy allows these. I had to recommend clients to use other servers earlier because of your server blocking secured email ports which prevents the use of smtp email functions. All these restrictions will drive away customers for sure. I hope you reconsider.
Jan 16, 2018
Email reply from Arvixe:
Hello Ivan, It is not the new policy. Before we used to support Lets Encrypt SSL certificate on our server’; however, now we have discontinued offering the Lets Encrypt SSL certificate. So, it is not possible to install Certificate on our server. If you have any further queries feel free to contact us. We are available 24X7. Sincerely,
After receiving this reply, I decided to move my site to MochaHost.com, which supports free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate as a cPanel feature as well as guaranteed renewal rate (no more 100% price increase during renewal). This site is now hosted on MochaHost.com. Note: If your web host does not support auto generation of Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate and you wish to learn how to generate one for your domain name, instructions can be found here. Jan 10, 2018 (as of Jan 11, 2018, the following instructions are useless on Arvixe shared hosting accounts)
  1. On cPanel, select SSL/TLS Manager
  2. Under Private Keys (KEY), click on Generate, view, upload, or delete your private keys.
  3. Click Browse… and select the private.key file from your hard drive
  4. It is recommended that you enter the domain names in the Description field
  5. Click Upload
  6. Click Return to SSL Manager
  7. Arvixe.com does not give user access to Certificate Signing Requests (CSR) and Certificates (CRT), contact the support department directly and arrange to send them the 2 files: ca_bundle.crt and certificate.crt to complete the SSL certificate installation
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