Unlikely to work on shared hosting

  • Hi Felix

    This plugin is a great idea in theory, but from what I can see it isn’t gong to be useful for the majority of WordPress users.

    I know that you have a footnote [1] with a message about “Almost no reason…”, but I think you should make the limitations more obvious at the top of the page, in your installation instructions, and/or in your FAQ.

    I managed to generate the certificate without problems, and it wasn’t until I encountered the second page of the help file buried in the plugin titled “Setting up SSL” that I realised it wasn’t going to be straightforward for users like me on a shared hosting plan.

    I have checked six hosting companies that I regularly use, and none of them allow editing httpd.conf files to configure a <VirtualHost> block.

    I contacted several of them, and they all refused to edit this for me. They did try to sell me their own SSL solution.

    When I went looking for alternative hosting providers, I discovered that those on the cutting-edge provide Let’s Encrypt via cPanel’s AutoSSL feature, in which case your plugin is presumably redundant.

    So if I understand correctly, WP Encrypt will only be usable for a small minority of WordPress users. You could save people a lot of wasted time by making this more obvious.

    If I have missed something, or have misinterpreted the instructions, I’d appreciate being corrected.

    • This topic was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by JohnP.
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  • @johnp

    Quite a few hosting companies already support Let’s Encrypt.

    But if you did not have permission to modify server config, then you could use something like this, to generate the SSL Let’s Encrypt cert.

    https://gethttpsforfree.com/

    Thread Starter JohnP

    (@johnp)

    Thanks Luke

    Shifting to a new hosting company who supports Let’s Encrypt is probably the solution I will go with.

    The WP Encrypt plugin has successfully generated a certificate, but to use it I would have to download it then install it manually via cPanel.

    If I only had to do this once it would be fine, but being committed to updating every 90 days makes it unviable in my opinion.

    @johnp

    Installing a SSL cert through cPanel is pretty straight forward to do.

    https://documentation.cpanel.net/display/ALD/Install+an+SSL+Certificate+on+a+Domain

    Plugin Author Felix Arntz

    (@flixos90)

    Hi John,

    I’m sorry that you wasted some time by trying to set up SSL using the plugin, maybe it should be more clear that one needs server config access to take care of using the certificates. On the other hand, the respective foot note is referenced in the first paragraph of the plugin description.

    This plugin is of course only an alternative to other methods of handling Let’s Encrypt certificates. In fact, if your server has a feature like AutoSSL, this might possibly be easier than using this plugin. WP Encrypt is specifically made for people who have server config access and would like to let WordPress take care of the certificates which can be especially useful for a multisite (all subsites get a certificate automatically in one click).

    Regarding uploading the certificates manually, I agree that this is painful because of the 90-day expiration. But as far as WordPress’ possibilities go right now, I don’t think there’s a way to support the entire process on any kind of host.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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