How to Install SSL in WHM – HostGator Tutorial

Hey everyone! It is Josh here with HostGator. Today I’m going to show you how to manage AutoSSL inside your WHM on your VPS or Dedicated Server. Let’s dive in! Now we all know how important SSL certificates are. Some browsers are not only recommending, but actually requiring that you have one. I’m going to show you today how we can get one installed if you have a VPS or Dedicated Server. We’ll do this through AutoSSL. Now it’s good to note
here before we get started that this is only a process that’s going to take place on your VPS or Dedicated Server. If you have a reseller with us that has WHM, we’ll do this process for you, so you don’t actually have to worry about it. If you’re logged into your WHM, now we’ll go ahead and go up top to the top left hand corner, and we’ll type in AutoSSL. Looking for the icon that says ‘Manage AutoSSL. Now this program is going to allow you to
install free domain validated SSL certificates on any domain that’s hosted on your server. We scroll down here to the bottom, we’ll actually see the AutoSSL providers. It’s going to show by default that cPanel powered by Sectigo is going to be the first one in use. I’ll provide some instructions down below in the description that will show you how to install Let’s Encrypt, but they’re basically going to do the same thing by installing a domain
validated SSL on any site that you have on your server. Once you have the auto ssl providers checked, I’m going to use Let’s Encrypt today, we will move over here to the options section. This is going to show us a few notification settings for it. If you want your users or the administrator to be notified whenever there is a failure or warning or deferral for an SSL certificate, you can note that those changes here. This is also an important
section down here that allows AutoSSL to replace invalid or expiring non-AutoSSL certificates on your server. So perhaps you had a paid SSL certificate on a domain before, and now you want to replace it with a Let’s Encrypt SSL. If you select, this it’s going to automatically replace that invalid or expiring certificate with a new one issued by either cPanel or Let’s Encrypt. So good to keep that in mind if you have a certificate that’s paid and
you don’t want it overwritten. Go ahead and leave this unselected, navigate over here to the logs section. Before we dive too deep into this, I actually want to show you how to trigger AutoSSL, so stick around because that’s the most important part. We’ll come back to the logs here in a second, and I’ll show you what happens after you trigger AutoSSL. Up here at the top on all tabs, you’re going to see the run AutoSSL for all users. That’s going
to allow you to trigger it for every single cpanel user that you have on your server. If you want to do this individually, let’s manage users real quick. Tab over to this section. Now you can see every single cPanel user that you have inside of your WHM. I’ve got three here and all of them are set to reset feature listing, so this is going to be exactly what the server default is set to. The server default is currently set on all these. Once you
enable AutoSSL it’s going to be set to ‘enabled’. If you want to have some have AutoSSL and some not have AutoSSL, you can toggle those here with the enable or disable. I personally want all of mine to have it so I’m completely fine with that. You can also click this checkbox to select every single cPanel, or you can choose over here in the left hand corner which ones you want to change, and which ones you don’t want to change. Once you’ve
clicked run AutoSSL for all users, let’s navigate back over here to the logs section. This is the most important part I would say because this will show you what’s actually taking place when AutoSSL runs. It’s a full check, you’ll see that it ran a check recently for all users. I’m going to scroll down here and click on the one that just ran for joshm, and i’m going to click ‘View Log’. Now you’re going to see a lot of information and data in
here. What we’re looking for specifically is the color-coded green sections. So we’ll scroll down. As you can see it’s doing some DCV and SSL DNS checks. We’re looking down here for the green. Success bars are what’s going to show us that an ssl has actually been installed. This one at the bottom, “Success the system has installed a new certificate on joshm’s website and joshmakestutorials. This means i have a brand new SSL already installed on
that. Now once I see this green bar and the success status, I can actually go to my website now and check it out. Now I’m not forcing https, but I can do this manually real quick. https:// and voila! I’ve got an SSL that is currently installed on that domain. Now it’s really that simple. I hope you found this helpful. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below, and subscribe if you want to see more. Thanks y’all!