Sams Tech Hosts is our main hosting company focusing on providing reliable and free web hosting. We are one of the best hosting providers, providing you with FREE CloudFlare Railgun and unlimited disk space and bandwith.
You can signup from here: https://samstechhosts.com/
The only problem we have, is that we cannot provide automatically SSL for free. We install a free self-signed SSL certificate on every hosting but it is not enough. We will cover later why it is a problem for websites.
Today, we will solve this problem by informing you on how to install a Free Certificate.

How to get Free SSL with: CloudFlare

Free SSL certificate that would be available to every customer of CloudFlare, even on free plans.
To get this SSL certificate, you will need to follow these simple steps:

1. Sign Up for Cloudflare
2. Transfer your domain to Cloudflare by changing nameservers (Your Site will not affected)

OR:

• If you are on SamsTech Hosting, use the CloudFlare integration on cPanel

GENERAL STEPS:

1. Go to the Crypto Section of your Dashboard then go to SSL
2. Select Flexible SSL if your hosting provider does not have an SSL already installed or Full if your provider has a certificate installed. For Sams Tech, select Full SSL.
3. Congratulations! You now have installed free SSL! Keep in Mind that it might take a few hours for the certificate to install.

Pros

• Ease of installation and use
• Every hosting provider supported, no matter if your host does not allow uploading SSL
• Full trusted certificate by Comodo

Cons

• SSL shared with other domains, showing ssl123456.cloudflaressl.com in certificate instead of your main domain, not dedicated
• Inability of Windows XP users to see your website through HTTPS
• cPanel integration does not offer support for subdomains

How to get Free SSL with: Let’s Encrypt

Let’s Encrypt was announced on Nov 18, 2014, two months after CloudFlare Universal SSL. It became available for users on September 14, 2015 however.
Its purpose is Delivering SSL/TLS Everywhere, for a more secure web.

Keep in mind that it is available only for Sams Tech Hosting or any other hosting which allows you to install a certificate at your origin server.

To get it, you will need to follow these simple steps:

1. Sign Up first for Cloudflare
2. Transfer your domain to Cloudflare by changing nameservers (cPanel won’t work)
3. Visit www.sslforfree.com
4. a) Enter your domain and any subdomains you want to include
   b) Select Manually Verify Domain (DNS)
   c) It will give you some TXT records, go and copy them
5. Go back to Cloudflare and sthen go to the DNS section of your Dashboard
6. Select TXT from the dropdown list, for name enter:
7. @ for your main domain
8. www for your domain with www
9. the name of your subdomain without your domain’s ending for subdomain
10. Paste the Records(TXT) that you copied
11. Go back to SSLForFree, it will give you a private key and certificate(s)
12. Open cPanel select SSL/TLS or whatever the SSL Management is called
13. Select your domain from the list
14. Upload the Private Key first
15. Upload Certificate next
16. Congratulations! You have installed the certificate!
17. You must disable CloudFlare’s Universal SSL for Let’s Encypt to work, to do so you must go to SSL section and press the “Disable Universal SSL” button in the bottom

• For subdomains to work you must have added an A record of them pointing to your IP adress at first before using the certificate.

What is SSL Certificate?

SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer which ensures the security of a website with a user.
We usually do online transactions, fill our personal information in desired forms, so we send our information to the web servers.
We need a secure connection in order to protect our data and here the SSL certificate takes place. When a website uses SSL certificate, HTTPS protocol establishes an encrypted connection between a web server and a user, so that any third person can’t access the particular information. It also makes more difficult for hackers to hack any website.
Moreover, most of the sites have a unique SSL Certificate.This helps in identifying a secure connection. Any site that is pretending to have a secure SSL or HTTPS connection and its certificate is not verified or does not match with the actual domain will make your browser show a warning message such as this one.

Why Moving To HTTPS is Recommended?

You must know that Google gives a slight boost to the rank of sites which are HTTPS enabled. But surely Google will increase the effect of this “boost” and of course, even a slight boost in SERP is essential to overcome our competitors.

It is not only reccomended anymore, but neccesary, and that we will cover in another article