Phishing/Scam emails - SSL certificates
From time to time you may get notifications that your SSL certificate is expiring and that you should pay to renew it
Now it's possible for anyone to check your SSL certificate is expiring, but is the email your looking at telling you it's expiring real or a scam?
First of all, why not check your certificate is really expiring at https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html this site can tell you when your certificate was issued and it's expiry date
With most cPanel packages, the certificate is renewed free of charge by https://letsencrypt.org/ who issues certificates on a 90 day basis, but from time to time, the system that auto-renews it is in a queuing system may in very rare circumstances find that your not at the head of the queue in enough time to renew it in good time
Should you find you haven't reached the head of the queue and your website's SSL has now expired - please contact support
The last thing to think about is, do you really need a SSL certificate ? If you have a wordpress blog for instance, the only person being protected in most cases is you, using your log in and password to edit your blog. Unless you have a mailing list that asks for subscribers email addresses and for them to create a password for modifying their subscription, in most cases the SSL certificate only protects you
Now on the other hand, if you have an ecommerce website asking for postal addresses and dealing with credit card information then you should consider a better SSL certificate such as a one year SSL certificate not only does it look more professional especially as you can usually check the information in the browser, by having a one year certificate you only need to worry about renewing checking it every year
An example of our SSL certificate for this website, showing expiry in September 2026
If you have registered a domain with us via OpenSRS and want a fairly basic and no frills annual SSL certificate, then it's possible to get a free one year certificate called SSL Lite now while it just secures your website domain and not sub-domains (like webmail.example.com) and requires you to use their DNS (e.g. ns1.systemdns.com) if your a community group or charity and every penny matters, then doing a "little" admin could save you some pennies.
Interested in this basic no frills SSL?
You'd need to push your domain name to our account, which would involve you contacting OpenSRS to enable "Domain Push" from your sub-reseller to ours, as only the person who owns the main account can request SSL Lite and we'd need to copy all your DNS entries to OpenSRS change your DNS to ns1.systemdns.com, ns2.systemdns.com and ns3.systemdns.com - if your currently using our DNS (ns1.co19dns.net to ns8.co19dns.net) we can export your entries into a text file and give them to you to copy and paste into OpenSRS
In the event you have quite a few domains and are interested in this, you might be better off registering for your own OpenSRS account for $95 USD. You do get to spend your $95 USD on future domain registrations and renewals, the $95 USD isn't a joining fee
Want a cheap annual SSL certificate?
However, if all that admin sounds like too much, please contact support and we'd be able to google for a SSL certificate for around £10 GBP only really suitable for a blog or social community group. Currently namecheap.com are offering annual SSL certificates for under £10