HTTPS & TLS
Free SSL comes as standard, and you only pay when a site outgrows it
Host with us and the certificate is issued free, then reissued automatically for as long as you stay. Should you later need subdomain-wide cover or a verified company name, wildcard and EV are there.
$0
cost of a standard certificate
Auto
from first issue through to every renewal
256-bit
encryption on every site
$1.5M
warranty on EV certificates
Why SSL Matters
What a certificate does for you in practice
This is more than compliance paperwork. It guards whatever a visitor types, and tells them at a glance the site is safe to use.
Visitors see a padlock
Load a page over HTTPS and the browser draws a padlock into the address bar beside your name. Drop the certificate and that same browser labels the page 'Not secure', a warning your visitor reads before reaching one word of the copy you wrote.
Traffic scrambled the whole way
Logins, form submissions and card payments travel between a visitor's browser and our servers already encrypted into ciphertext. Whoever intercepts that connection collects nothing but noise for their trouble.
No expiry dates to diarise
Replacement comes early. Well before the expiry date, the certificate swaps itself for a fresh one without announcing it. No one on your side wakes to a broken padlock, or to a checkout firing security warnings across a weekend.
Search engines notice
Search engines tip the balance towards encrypted pages. Put two almost identical sites side by side and the one served over HTTPS usually finishes higher.
Proof of who is behind it
Before an EV certificate is issued at all, the company behind the site gets checked, and the verified name is then written into the certificate for anyone to look up. Pages where a customer types card details are where that counts for most.
Live before you ask
Point the name's DNS records at our network and the free certificate is issued and put in place on the spot. There is nothing to purchase, and nothing to configure once it lands.
Included Free
The standard certificate costs nothing
Shared, WordPress, reseller, VPS or dedicated, the plan makes no difference: a free certificate comes with it. Installation happens on its own, the cover reaches your name and every subdomain sitting beneath it, and each reissue goes through in the background without a word. The padlock goes up and it stays up.
- The name and its subdomains both covered
- Live the moment DNS arrives here
- Replaced by itself before it lapses
- No teaser rate that jumps at renewal
Paid Tiers
When it starts making sense to pay
A site can outgrow the free certificate, and at that point paid cover starts to earn what it costs you. Take the wildcard. One file protects an unlimited spread of subdomains, however many of them you add later on. EV reaches further again by writing your verified company name into the certificate details, which is a sound move for online retailers, membership platforms and any page where sensitive data is typed in.
- DV (domain-validated) cover available
- One wildcard across all your subdomains
- EV where the highest trust is wanted
- Up to $1.5 million in warranty backing
Paying Extra
Plenty of sites never pay anything
Encryption strength is identical whether you pay or not, and the included certificate reissues itself. Exactly two situations justify spending money here.
The certificate bundled with your plan reissues itself, puts the padlock in front of visitors and speaks current TLS. For an ordinary brochure site, or for a modest online shop, that meets the requirement completely. Charging you for an upgrade that would alter nothing visible is not something we are willing to do.
Two gaps exist, and only two. No free certificate will cover an unlimited spread of subdomains from one file, so for that particular job you want Wildcard. The second gap is identity: no free option carries an audited company name backed by a financial warranty, so there you need Extended Validation, which chiefly earns its keep on pages handling payments or logins, where you want the strongest trust signal that is available.
Looking for a warranty-backed certificate on one name only, with no wildcard cover attached? That remains available. Put a request in and we'll give you a straight answer on whether it would make any difference to your particular site.
Wildcard SSL Certificate
A single certificate for the name itself and all its subdomains
$169.99/yr
the price never jumps at renewal · covers every subdomain
- Validation
- Domain (DV)
- Issued
- Usually same day
- Warranty
- $10,000
- Secures
- *.yourdomain
- Every subdomain protected by a single certificate
- Issued to cover *.yourdomain
- The padlock appears on all of them together
- Backed by a $10,000 relying-party warranty
- Useful where an application creates new subdomains on the fly
- We fit the certificate for you, and there is no charge
- Issued the same day in most cases
- 256-bit encryption on a 2048-bit key
- Put it on as many servers as you care to
- Reissue it as often as you need
The order gets finalised over at Hosting Cheap, the shared billing system that sits behind all of our brands.
EV SSL Certificate
Extended validation puts your confirmed company name into the certificate itself
$379.99/yr
the price never jumps at renewal · highest assurance
- Validation
- Extended (EV)
- Issued
- 1–3 days
- Warranty
- $1,500,000
- Secures
- 1 domain
- The EV process confirms the business is real and on the register
- Once we verify it, your company name travels inside the certificate
- No certificate can carry more assurance than this one does
- Backed by a $1,500,000 relying-party warranty
- Gives buyers confidence at checkout and sign-in
- Our team walks you through validation, start to finish
- 256-bit encryption on a 2048-bit key
- Trusted by every major browser
- Reissue it as often as you need
- A site seal for your footer
The order gets finalised over at Hosting Cheap, the shared billing system that sits behind all of our brands.
Once the payment clears, validation becomes our job and we install the finished certificate for you as well. A wildcard is usually done and dusted inside a day. EV takes a few days more, because the company standing behind the site has to be checked before a certificate can be issued at all.
The Process
Three steps in all, and only one of them is yours
- 1
Point the DNS here
Only one step asks anything of you. Add the name to your account, then point its DNS at our platform. Everything after that point happens without you lifting a finger.
- 2
The platform picks it up
With verification back and clean, the free certificate is ordered and switched live against the name. Nothing to click. No files to upload, and nothing to shuffle between folders on a server.
- 3
It keeps itself current
Each reissue arrives while the previous certificate is still valid, so HTTPS holds and the padlock stays where it is. You will never have to write a renewal date in a diary.
Standard
What the certificate covers
- A certificate at no cost on every plan
- Issued and installed automatically
- Your name and its subdomains covered
- Reissue handled in the background
- HTTPS-only redirects when you want them
- TLS 1.3 as standard
- Step-ups to DV, wildcard and EV
- Trusted in every mainstream browser
- Plain pricing, nothing added on
- Real people on support, at any hour
Asked A Lot
Certificates, without the jargon
Does every plan really include SSL?
Free, yes. A certificate at no cost comes attached to every hosting plan on this site. We order it in your name and keep it valid for however long the site remains with us.
When would paying for a certificate actually make sense?
Most sites never reach that point. Traffic is encrypted by the free certificate and the padlock appears, which is the whole of what a normal site requires. Paying buys exactly two extras on top of that. Every subdomain you own can be gathered beneath one wildcard file. An EV certificate adds an audited check on your company identity, and both browsers and buyers treat that as a firmer guarantee than a plain domain check.
Do visitors see the padlock?
Yes, from the moment it goes live: a padlock shows up and each page is delivered over HTTPS. Leave a site without a valid certificate and browsers pin a 'Not secure' label into the address bar instead.
Is the renewal mine to manage?
None at all. Reissue on the free certificate happens in good time and asks nobody for permission. For paid wildcard and EV certificates, a message goes out to you before the validation window opens, which is what keeps the cover running unbroken.
Does HTTPS cost anything in speed?
Nothing a stopwatch would pick up. Modern TLS implementations are tuned very tightly, and HTTPS is the price of admission to HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, protocols that tend to leave a site faster than they found it.
Will one certificate cover every subdomain?
Your main name and the subdomains beneath it are already covered by the free certificate. Running subdomains in quantity? A wildcard folds every one of them into a single certificate, which keeps the paperwork down to a single file.
Put a padlock on everything that you publish.
Any plan carries a self-reissuing certificate free, with wildcard or EV waiting for the day you need to prove exactly who stands behind the site.
Compare Our PlansBrowsers stopped being polite about missing encryption a long time ago. Every domain here gets a certificate free, installed and renewed with no reminder in anyone's calendar. In the engine room sit NVMe storage, LiteSpeed caching, our redundant London datacentre and engineers awake at three in the morning.
Set up for owners encrypting what visitors hand over: a free certificate on every domain, a free lift off your old host, automatic nightly backups, and no distance between the listed price and the invoice.
Free SSL as standard, paid SSL when required
That free certificate spans the domain and its subdomains, fits itself and renews punctually. Paid options exist for projects that want a wildcard across many subdomains, a longer warranty or an organisation-validated seal, issued quickly and installed by us if you would rather not.
Beneath the surface every certificate runs on the same platform: NVMe drives instead of spinning disks, LiteSpeed instead of a stock web server, and a 99.9% uptime figure written into the terms.
Where a paid certificate genuinely earns its keep
Billing ought to be uneventful: one figure, stated up front, repeated at renewal, with promotions labelled plainly rather than tucked into a footnote. Licences and issued certificates go live the moment they exist, so refunds on those are weighed case by case, while any hosting ordered alongside keeps its full 30-day money-back guarantee.
Basic encryption is never an upsell; it is standard on every domain and every plan. Paid certificates carry their prices on the page with the extras spelled out, so deciding whether you need one takes a minute.
Issue and renewal, fully automated
Issue and renewal happen automatically across the platform, with certificates installed and sites moved to HTTPS without downtime. Renewals fire well ahead of expiry, and a failure pages our engineers rather than only you.
The invisible work — patching, monitoring, replacing hardware, filtering — is included and done by us. It is most of what the money actually buys.
- Auto-renewed free SSL on every domain
- Wildcard and OV options for the projects that need them
- Minute-by-minute monitoring from our network desk
- Redundant network paths and conditioned power
Good to Know
More that's built in
Expiry never ambushes you
Renewals run ahead of schedule and page our engineers when they fail. A browser warning should never be how you find out.
Humans on the line
Engineers hold the queue at every hour, aiming at a reply inside 2 hours, or 1 hour when the site is down.
Next year costs the same
Every plan renews at the rate you began on, with no second price waiting further along.
99.9% uptime, under SLA
A redundant London datacentre, automatic failover, and monitoring that wakes an engineer before you notice anything.
A panel that stays out of the way
The controls sit where instinct expects them, which is most of what a decent panel owes anybody.
Scale up without relocating
Outgrowing a tier is fixed with one click in the panel rather than a migration eating your weekend.
Getting Going
Getting going takes three steps
- 1
Line up the tiers
Connect the domain to your account.
- 2
Point your name
The free certificate issues and installs automatically.
- 3
Ship it
Want a wildcard or OV seal? Order it and we handle that install too.
In Every Plan
Thrown in without an extra charge
- 30-day guarantee stays on hosting bought with it
- HTTPS live with no manual installation
- Automatic renewal well ahead of expiry
- Shaped around owners encrypting what visitors hand over
- Every hosted domain gets SSL free
- Your migration is carried out by our engineers at no cost
- Backups taken automatically every day, all plans
- a 99.9% uptime SLA that pays credits when missed
Still Curious
Questions that keep coming up
Does a paid certificate encrypt any better than the free one?
No: the encryption is byte for byte identical, with the same strength and the same browser trust. Paying adds organisation validation, wildcard subdomain coverage and a warranty, which some businesses need for legal or procurement reasons. Most sites do perfectly well on the free one, and we will tell you as much.
How quickly can SSL certificates be up and running?
Straight away. Orders provision themselves, and if you would rather we set things up, the help desk is staffed whatever hour you are reading this.
Does the price move at renewal?
The same rate and the same amount. There is no introductory price here that quietly doubles once you have settled in.
What if SSL certificates proves to be the wrong call?
Licences and issued certificates go live at once, so refunds are settled case by case; contact the desk inside 7 days and we will find a fair outcome. Any hosting bought at the same time keeps its full 30-day money-back guarantee either way.
Keep reading
Secure Hosting
Hardened accounts, DDoS screening, daily backups.
Web Hosting
NVMe cPanel hosting from $2.42/mo with SSL and migration in.
Domain Names
Domains from $2.99 with renewal pricing shown up front.
Handpicked from the Resource Library
Installing an SSL Certificate
Issue the certificate, set the redirect, then watch the padlock appear.
SSL Certificates, Defined
That padlock proves one narrow thing, and it never once claimed the rest.
Let's Encrypt or Paid SSL?
Free certificates cover most sites. Paying starts to earn its keep somewhere past that.