Godaddy though a popular hosting company, is now becoming a hassle: 1. more expensive than many others such as hostinger.com / hostinger.in, 2. They don't offer free SSL and many are complaining about it.
I was using zerossl for free fine with Godaddy before, but unfortunately, zerossl only offers 3 x 90 day licenses. I could use another email address to apply for zerossl again, but I need to find something more convenient. Tried Cloudflare, which was complicated, wasted a few days trying to figure out how to go about it. Tried punchsalad.com which uses Let's Encrypt certificate, but I was not able to go past "Verify Domain", it just takes me back to punchsalad's main site again, here's his video guide, which didn't work for me:
Worst case is to go back to zerossl with new accounts, but I will keep looking. nycphantom and solotempehnj will just have to suffer the "not secure" prompt especially by Chrome for now.
Update 4/9/25 After hours of looking for solutions, I think I'll just stick to zerossl for now. Create a new account every 90 days isn't too bad.
Update 7/9/2025 So both my domains: nycphantom.com and SolotempehNJ.com have their SSL expired yesterday. Though I was able to renew my nycphantom.com SSL for another 90 days free of charge (zerossl), creating a new account on zerossl wouldn't let me create SSL for solotempehnj.com anymore, saying something about no longer allowed for this domain. I thought nycphantom.com would have been blocked as well. So I tried sslforweb.com, per the email correspondence with the owner, Robert, of punchsalad.com when he personally emailed me about renewing my account at his site. He recommended sslforweb, which he claimed to be similar infrastructure/mechanism as his. sslforweb actually works, though I couldn't get his to work before at punchsalad. However, with sslforweb, I had to wait patiently after hitting Validate Domain many times. Perhaps this was the same problem with PunchSalad. After more than 5 minutes, it finally went through with generation of my SSL certificate with Certificate, Private Key & CA Bundle (which are to be uploaded to GoDaddy via its CPanel-> Security-> SSL/TLS, hit INSTALL button after Certificate.CRT is loaded in CPanel ). Both my new SSL (nycphantom.com from zerossl & solotempehnj.com from sslforweb) certificates expire in Oct. 7. I shall see if SSLForWeb will let me keep renewing my certs, so I can abandon the $ greedy zero$$L.
Generate PEM (Private Key) & Certificate via SSLForWeb, CA Bundle can be ignored. These will need to be updated on Godaddy's SSL via CPanel.
Update: 1/12/2026, Just did the above for renewal again, works very well. Next renewal 4/13/2026
These are the complete basic steps to renew SSL:
To generate certificate in SSLForWeb:
Create SSL, Verification Type: DNS for domain.com,www.domain.com (might not matter if www.domain.com is not included),
check Accept "Let's Encrypt SA", hit Create button.
Then it will require copying one or two (with www.domain.com) TXT records to godaddy's DNS Records (if there's existing entries/names, just update the data/value key).
Status can quickly be checked after saving the entries (within seconds).
But wait for longer time (4-5 mins) when clicking Validate Domain.
Then install those keys/certs at Godaddy:
Via its CPanel Admin -> Security-> SSL/TLS (for Certificate, Private Key & CA Bundle ), these certificates can be easily copied/pasted as text or uploaded/saved as files (downloaded from sslforweb)
Last but not least, go to INSTALL AND MANAGE SSL FOR YOUR SITE (HTTPS) - Manage SSL Sites on SSL/TLS page to overwrite the expired certificate by clicking on "Browse Certificates" and choosing the new certificate. (Wait can be up to 72 hours, but usual within an hour or two such as this time)