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I'm having a problem with Bluehost hosting and my Let's Encrypt certificates I use for my website https://shinesolar.com.

It seems like three or four times a week (I can't see a pattern), something invalidates my certificate, and makes it revert back to the self-signed certificate assigned to the default domain name I was given when I signed up (ttc.jtq.mybluehost.me). Today it happened twice that I noticed:

  1. When I woke up at 6:30 AM MST, it had reverted back to the self signed certificate, I ran the command to restore the certificate and it was working again...and I didn't touch the server the rest of the day.
  2. At around 4:30 PM MST, again, it reverted back to the self-signed certificate. I ran the command to restore the certificate, and it worked again.

There is no open issue for Bluehost on Github for certbot, nor is Bluehost one of the named supporters in the Let's Encrypt wiki...so my question is two fold:

What is going on that the server is reverting back to self signed certificates (or how can I investigate for myself, I don't even know where to start). How can I prevent this from happening in the future?

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  • Did you contact anyone at Bluehost and explain what’s happening?
    – Giacomo1968
    Jun 29, 2018 at 2:30
  • @JakeGould Yes, and because it's a VPS server, they said they're not responsible for any server configuration changes made
    – Adam McGurk
    Jun 29, 2018 at 2:32
  • My guess then is this is more about the config of your VPS more than anything else.
    – Giacomo1968
    Jun 29, 2018 at 2:48
  • Your site runs on cPanel/WHM, so it'd be easier for you to use the built-in automatic site certificate installer, AutoSSL, than to fight cPanel with Certbot.
    – Deltik
    Jun 29, 2018 at 3:04

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Your site is managed by the cPanel/WHM software, which tightly controls how its websites are configured.

When you run Certbot, it is probably overwriting the cPanel-generated Apache configuration file.

cPanel ensures the integrity of the Apache configuration file through the same mechanism as /scripts/rebuildhttpdconf, which erases Certbot's changes.

Let's Encrypt certificates can be issued automatically through cPanel. To get started, all you have to do is run this command:

/scripts/install_lets_encrypt_autossl_provider

Then, navigate to: WHM » SSL/TLS » Manage AutoSSL (link is customized for you)

Here, you can configure AutoSSL to provide your hosting account with Let's Encrypt certificates for the account's domains.

Alternatively, you can use cPanel's own certificate authority (powered by Comodo) without running any commands. It's available as shown in the screenshot below:

AutoSSL providers

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