Why you should delete your old certificates when moving to a new webhost.

I moved to a new web hosting company called GreenGeeks this week. They offered faster performance at a cheaper price. I also liked the fact that they are environmental.

One of the minor issues that happened when moving is that I had to delete my old certificate. It turns out that when I created some subdomains the certificate didn’t know that they existed, so naturally it wouldn’t let me go to those pages. Browsers now try to protect users and require certificates for webpages. The browser I use is Brave which is very strict about security and requires a certificate for every page. Since that page didn’t have one, it wouldn’t let me browse to it.

Well this fix was straightforward. I had to go to CPANEL and go to the SSL and delete all of the certificates on my site. Since I only host a website on this provider it didn’t affect anyone but me. The situation would be more complicated if email was involved, but that is not the case with me. Once I deleted the certificate, GreenGeeks had a super easy SSL certificate installer. It walked through all of the manual steps that other providers force you to do. One it applied and installed the new SSL cert from Lets Encrypt, everything worked great. I was able to go to my subdomain.

Now Lets Encrypt is a great free option, but unfortunately it doesn’t support Windows XP clients. So that means that perhaps the 15% of people using XP may not be able to see my website. If I wanted to spend $50 I could buy a certificate that would support XP clients, but since I am not making money at this site I didn’t do that. For a business site using Let’s Encrypt is not appropriate. You don’t want to discourage anyone in your audience from buying from you by not being supported to view the page.

The other advantage of getting a new certificate is that now I have a very long time until I need to update the certificate. I am just thrilled with GreenGeeks so far.