Glossary Entry
What is Let's Encrypt?
Let's Encrypt without the jargon — the definition, the analogy, and why any site owner should care.
The short answer
Let's Encrypt is the automated certificate authority that made HTTPS universal at no cost, issuing short-dated certificates that renew unattended.
What follows: the longer explanation, a picture that holds, the practical stakes, and the places you will genuinely meet it.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
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Through the ACME protocol a server proves domain control and collects a certificate without a person involved at any stage. Once that is automated, encryption costs nothing and asks for no administration either. The ninety-day lifetimes are deliberate, keeping the renewal machinery exercised and working.
It powers almost every host's free SSL, ours included. What it issues carries full browser trust and matches a paid domain-validated certificate in strength exactly.
A way to picture Let's Encrypt
A dispenser handing out short-dated passes to anybody who can prove on the spot which door they already have the key to. Nothing to queue for, nothing to pay, no forms, and the pass renews itself before it runs out.
Carry that picture with you and most documentation on the topic loses its mystery on a first read.
What genuinely rides on it
That is how encryption stopped being a purchase and became ordinary maintenance. Where a host still puts a standard certificate on the invoice as its own line, you are paying for a problem the industry settled years ago.
Nobody expects you to work at this layer daily. The aim is recognising it when it explains something — and that moment is exactly when this page pays for itself.
Let's Encrypt out in the open
Point a new domain at our hosting and a browser-trusted certificate exists within minutes: issued, installed and already queued for renewal, with nobody having clicked anything.
Scale that example across every website online and you have described the whole job of the concept in one stroke.
Where it appears on this platform
You will meet it in the control panel and now and then in a support thread, usually already set correctly. If this one landed, the natural follow-ups are SSL Certificate, HTTPS, TLS and Wildcard SSL.
A free SSL certificate comes with every plan and reissues itself before the old one lapses — the padlock is never yours to diarise.
Unexplained jargon slows everybody down
Sooner or later every confusing hosting term turns into a support ticket, so we defined the hundred commonest ones properly — once, in the same plain English we use with customers.
NVMe storage and LiteSpeed caching sit under every tier, the smallest plan included — that is the floor here, not an upgrade.
- 100+ entries, plain English all the way
- Ordinary analogies, working examples
- Neighbouring ideas linked together
- Written by our own support engineers
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Cross-wired entries
Related terms point at each other, so one lookup compounds into working knowledge.
Tied to real hosting
Examples name platforms you would genuinely use, never an abstract diagram on a whiteboard.
This term, properly landed
Let's Encrypt defined, pictured by analogy and located in your own panel — recognise-level after a single read.
Analogies that hold
Every concept comes with a mental model that returns exactly when you need it.
Jargon-free by design
Definitions written for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — translation rather than restatement.
Stakes made explicit
More than what a thing is: the moments it turns out to be the answer to a problem you have.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find it in your own account
Open the control panel and find where this idea sits — a definition turns into understanding the moment it attaches to your own site.
- 2
Check the defaults as they stand
The platform ships sensible defaults for this — check rather than assume, and your setup becomes something you know instead of hope.
- 3
Chase the neighbouring terms
Hosting terms travel in groups — SSL Certificate, HTTPS and TLS finish this one's picture, each a two-minute read away.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- Softaculous included for one-click application installs
- A renewal figure identical to the one you registered at
- cPanel, which is what most of the industry already runs
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for any client
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
- Your existing site brought across by our engineers, at no charge
- Upgrades applied in place, with no migration when you change plan
- NVMe SSD storage on every tier, not only the dear ones
- Mailboxes that answer at the name you hold
- WebP image optimisation built in, at no extra charge
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
Does a paid certificate encrypt better than a free one?
Not in any way that touches the encryption. The same ciphers, the same browser trust, the same padlock. Paid certificates add deeper vetting of your organisation, warranty cover and easier wildcard handling. All of that is procurement convenience rather than a stronger lock.
Why do the certificates expire after 90 days?
Two deliberate reasons. A stolen certificate is worth much less when it lapses soon, and a short cycle forces renewal automation to exist and run often enough that you learn it works. On managed hosting you never see the cycle, which is the design behaving exactly as intended.
What is the refund position if I change my mind?
Shared, business, WordPress and WooCommerce hosting get thirty days, and reseller gets seven. VPS and dedicated servers are built to order the moment payment lands, so they sit outside the guarantee — as do domain registrations, where the registry charges the instant the name is secured. Inside the window one request returns the hosting fee, with no retention script to sit through.
What is the uptime commitment, and what happens in a month that misses it?
99.9% — and if a month falls below that through a fault on our side, our terms entitle you to a pro-rated credit; ask and we apply it. Calling it a target rather than a contractual SLA is a deliberate choice. Hardware and network faults surface through platform monitoring, usually before the first customer notices.
Keep reading
HTTPS
Wrap ordinary HTTP in an encrypted connection and you have HTTPS, the web's standard transport, which keeps…
Wildcard SSL
A wildcard SSL certificate secures a domain along with all of its first-level subdomains, so *.example.com …
Best Let's Encrypt vs Paid SSL
The same call put as a buyer's guide: what to verify, what to ignore, and the plan we would sign.
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