SSL Cert expired without warning

[Robin Hewitt]

On the 17th our SSL certificate suddenly expired without warning so the website died.
I got my brother on it but when he tried to renew they couldn't help because it seems we renewed in July and it should not have expired.
Today it is still not working so I told him to buy another SSL certificate because we are haemorrhaging curstomers. No joy.
I presume freeparking have small print to say they cannot be held responsible?
Wonder what is going on, am I the only one suffering? Maybe the problem is FireFox? I went to the Rapid SSL site but there was no way to check if we were current or not.

 

[UrbanRetail]

No luck on Chrome either.

Are you sure the certificate has been installed correctly? I cant check from the front end. You could try LetsEncrypt as an alternative.

 

[fisicx]

Renewals of registration, hosting and SSL are all your responsibility.

Your host will almost certainly have sent a reminder email to the address they have on record but the actual renewal is up to you.

 

[Robin Hewitt]

Still down. Let's wait and see if anybody has the same.

I am having nothing but problems this year, stock that was supposed to be here in March arrived in September, Santander investigated me because some bod called Mohammed in Bimingham decided to send £7.50 by bank transfer, plus the accounts computer lunged it's PSU and I'm getting too old for this.

 

[Robin Hewitt]

Getting more information. The notion that we renewed in July could be totally bogus. We have ordered a new SSL and are now waiting. Fisicx is probably correct and this is totally self inflicted. I think I should stop interfering and simply let it happen.

 

[fisicx]

Check the email address the host has on the account. If it's correct check that email address to see where all the reminders have gone. If it's not correct, change it to one that you check regularly.

I had three email from my host about an SSL expiry: a month before, a week before and the day before.

There was a member here who set up a free service that alerted you about expirations. And a quick Google reveals a number of people doing this.

 

[Inva]

Most cPanel hosts will give you free Comodo SSL which auto renews. Ask to make sure.

 

[andygambles]

SSL/TLS certificates are not like domains. A renewal does not extend the expiry of the existing certificate you have to generate and install a new one. Expiry dates are hard coded for security reasons.

Your host may do this for you as part fo the service.

 

[Robin Hewitt]

Still waiting for a fix. Someone actually shopped on the site yesterday, must have pressed "I don't care" when faced with huge lists of dire consequences.
Hostmonster will allow me to self SSL certificate but I don't think the web browsers will let me get away with that for a shop.

 

[NuBlue]

What fix are you waiting for? The SSL used by your site was bought October 17th last year and expired October 16th. As explained by @andygambles they don't always (see below) auto-renew like a domain name. A bought SSL needs to be installed so I assume you are waiting for whoever looks after your hosting to install it for you.

If your host offers Let's Encrypt, they're free, valid only for 3 months at a time but most implementations of Let's Encrypt will auto-renew.

 

[Inva]

This is a simple matter which really needs to be settled through your host. Contact them and ask to get it done. If it costs unreasonable money, pay it and move hosts later. Better than your losing income.

 

[Robin Hewitt]

Back up and running again. Thanks for putting up with me, needed to vent.

 

[ukbf0001]

You can get your site SSL'd via cloudflare (for free)

 

[LucyTex]

Setup monitoring with a free tool like Uptime Robot and it will notify you by email or text message if problems are detected.