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You might have noticed it already. The last few months more and more websites are giving you a secure way of connecting to their website using an SSL certificate. The benefit of making your website available over SSL is the fact that data that is send and received will be encrypted. Since almost every website has a at least contact form now a days I would advise everyone to use it. Don’t be afraid, it is simple to setup and completely free of charge.
What are the benefits for you:
- Thanks to Let’s Encrypt a certificate is free!
- Google and other search engines love SSL connections
- Your website with SSl runs over HTTP/2 instead of the slower HTTP/1
- Your certificate gets renewed automatically every three months
- Super simple setup through the admin panel
How to create a SSL Certificate for your website
1. Open the Aphotrax controle panel and login with your credentials.
2. Choose for SSL Certificates below the Advanced Features.
3. Choose to create your own certificate and choose the option ‘Free & automatic certificate from Let’s Encrypt’
3. Fill in all the fields below the option, leave the large text field empty and click on Save.
4. In a few seconds you will see a confirmation message that your certifcate has been created.
How to enable SSL for your website
There are a few possibilities you can choose from, you can make your current website available over HTTP and HTTPS or only over HTTPS. See the three options below to learn more about the main information about this.
A. To direct HTTPS to a secondary private folder you will just have to put your content in the folder ‘private_html’ instead of the normal ‘public_html’. Visitors that go to your domain over HTTPS will get the content form this folder served on their screen.
B. To make your current website available over HTTPS you can redirect the private folder to the public folder. You can set this option under ‘Domain Setup’ and click on the option ‘Use a symbolic link from private_html to public_html – allows for same data in http and https’. Don’t forget to press save. In this case all visitors will see the same content.
C. In case you want to disable HTTP and redirect all your visitors to the HTTPS version you can create a .htaccess file in the ‘public_html’ folder with the following text:
# BEGIN SSL
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
# END SSL