Buyer's Guide
Hosting With Free SSL: a straight buyer's guide
Written for buyers who have noticed other shops charging extra for a basic certificate — the tests that matter, the trap to sidestep, and where we would honestly send you.
Straight answer first
If you read one paragraph only, the right pick is a host that issues a Let's Encrypt certificate on every plan without being asked, keeping the paid certificates on the shelf for genuine wildcard and organisation-validation cases.
Everything below unpacks that recommendation: the tests to apply, the classic mistake, and how to check any of it for yourself before spending a penny.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
NVMe
Storage in every plan
Free
Domain, year one
99.9%
Uptime commitment held
Flat
Price at renewal
This guide is written for buyers who have noticed other shops charging extra for a basic certificate. If that describes you, the decision has a right answer — it just is not the one the comparison-table trade is paid to hand out.
One market fact frames the whole thing: ever since automated certificate authorities turned up, a charge for basic SSL has been margin and nothing else — machines do the issuing, the fitting and the renewing without a human going near them.
The handful of checks that matter
Here is the scorecard we would use — and the one we invite you to hold us to:
Issuing and renewal handled automatically — the certificate should never be anybody's task.
Cover across every domain and subdomain on the account, not just the main one on the invoice.
Installation done properly with the redirects in place, rather than a certificate left on the counter for you to fit.
Paid options such as wildcard or organisation validation available when you need them, and nobody pushing them when you do not.
What to leave on the shelf (and why it is everywhere)
Providers who bill you every year for a basic DV certificate that costs them nothing to hand out — as pure a junk fee as this trade sells.
Once you know to look for it, you can see it right across this market — and dodging it matters more than optimising any other number on the page.
What we would order in your position
A host that issues a Let's Encrypt certificate on every plan without being asked, keeping the paid certificates on the shelf for genuine wildcard and organisation-validation cases.
In concrete terms, that is our Launch option: one flat price, stocked with the essentials (SSL, migration, backups, mail) this market loves to sell separately, and upgradeable in place when the job grows.
Real people answer the counter at any hour, including the awkward questions other hosts wave off as out of scope.
The homework worth doing first
Any host worth ordering from survives inspection: check the renewal price is printed on the tag rather than in a footnote, ask support a real question at an awkward hour and read the reply, comb the refund policy for carve-outs, and look up the company registration — a genuine business leaves a paper trail.
The refund window covers the rest — move a real site across (the free migration makes that painless), live with it for a fortnight, and let daily use settle what no marketing page can.
Why we can afford to give a straight answer
Most 'best hosting' writing is paid ranking. Ours has a simpler motive: we recommend the setup we would sell you anyway, and we say so — which leaves the rest of the page free to be genuinely useful.
Mailboxes on your own domain are part of the plan, never an add-on sold back to you at checkout.
- Tests you can run for yourself
- Renewal prices on the tag, not in a footnote
- The free move in makes trying us painless
- A refund policy with no small print
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
The essentials on the tag
SSL, migration, backups and mail come with every plan instead of appearing at checkout as extras.
A company you can look up
Bohzo Ltd, registered in England and Wales — a host with a public record you can read before trusting.
A refund without a gauntlet
If it does not suit, leaving is a request rather than a negotiation — which is why we are content to be tested.
Support you can try first
Ask us something hard before you pay — how a host behaves pre-sale is the ceiling of what follows.
One price, plainly printed
The order price is the renewal price — the comparison that matters is the one we win without trying.
Matched to this verdict
The Launch plan is this page's recommendation made concrete — one flat price, essentials included, upgradeable in place.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Write the requirement in one sentence
Put down what the site has to do and for whom — for buyers who have noticed other shops charging extra for a basic certificate, that one sentence usually settles half the plan choice by itself.
- 2
Price the second year, not the first
Teaser rates are this market's favourite trick, so compare hosts on what year two costs and the field reorders itself on the spot.
- 3
Try it inside the refund window
A live trial with your own site answers what no review can, and the free migration plus the refund policy make that trial genuinely risk-free.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- Staging copies so changes get tested before they go live
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
- WordPress Toolkit, with updates applied for you
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- cPanel, the panel the rest of the trade already knows
- Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
- The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Is a free certificate as good as a paid one?
The encryption is exactly the same. What money buys is wildcard cover, organisation validation or a warranty — procurement features rather than a stronger padlock. For most sites the free DV certificate is the whole job done.
What do I have to do to turn it on?
Nothing at all. The certificate is issued the moment a site is added to the account, and it renews itself from then on. The one thing worth a glance is that HTTP forwards to HTTPS, and that is configured by default.
Do you shift an existing site across at no charge?
We do. Open a ticket with the login details for your current host and the whole lot comes over: files, databases, mailboxes and configuration. You check the copy before DNS changes hands, and the old site keeps serving customers until the new one takes the traffic, so nobody ever sees a gap.
Does hosting come with mailboxes?
It does — mailboxes on your own domain ship with every hosting plan, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP access and spam filtering fitted as standard. There is also standalone email hosting for domains whose website lives somewhere else entirely.
What uptime do you commit to, and who is watching?
We commit to 99.9% uptime and watch it continuously. That figure is an operational target rather than a poster line, and the alerting behind it usually has an engineer on a problem before the first customer notices anything is wrong.
Can one plan hold more than a single website?
From the Pro tier upward, yes — several sites, each with its own domain, mailboxes and certificate, all under one account. If those extra sites belong to clients rather than to you, reseller hosting is the better fit: it gives each one proper separation.
How quickly can I be up and running?
Minutes, not days. The account opens the moment the order clears, the domain — free for year one on annual plans — attaches straight away, and the one-click installer puts WordPress or any of 400+ applications on the page before you leave your chair. Already have a site elsewhere? Hand it over and we move it free, usually inside a day.
Read next
Addon Domains vs Separate Accounts
A straight buyer's guide, written for owners of several sites deciding how far apart those sites ought to be kept.
Hosting With Fixed Renewal Pricing
A straight buyer's guide, written for buyers who have already met the year-two invoice ambush once and would rather not again.
SSL Certificates
SSL free on every plan, with wildcard and EV on the shelf if needed.
VPS Hosting
KVM virtual servers with root access, DDoS filtering and one flat price.
Packing up and moving host? Take our checklist.
A plain running order for a move nobody notices: what to copy first, how to carry email across without dropping a single message, when to point DNS, and the two slips behind nearly every hour of downtime we get called about.
Your site is worth better hosting.
Free SSL, a free move in, renewals charged at the order price, and human support around the clock. That is the whole offer.
See the plans