Hosting Terms
What is Let's Encrypt?
Let's Encrypt in plain English — the meaning, the comparison, and why it matters to anybody running a website.
Straight answer first
Let's Encrypt is the free, automated certificate authority that made HTTPS universal — it issues short-lived certificates that renew themselves entirely by machine.
Below: the fuller explanation, a picture that makes it stick, why it matters in practice, and where you will actually run into it.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
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Its ACME protocol lets a server prove it controls a domain and collect a certificate with no human involved at any point. That automation took the cost of encryption to zero and the admin to nothing. Ninety-day lifetimes are deliberate: they force the renewal machinery to stay in working order.
It is the engine behind almost every host's free SSL, ours included. The certificates it issues are trusted by browsers and identical in strength to a paid domain-validated one.
The picture that makes Let's Encrypt stick
A vending machine that issues short-dated passes to anybody who can prove on the spot which door they already hold the key to. No queue, no fee, no paperwork, and the pass renews itself before it lapses.
Keep that picture in mind and most of the documentation you will ever read on the subject stops being mysterious.
What is actually at stake
This is why encryption stopped being a purchase and became basic upkeep. Any host still putting a line item on a standard certificate is charging you for a problem the industry solved years ago.
You do not need to work at this layer every day. You need to recognise it when it explains something, which is exactly the moment this page earns its keep.
Let's Encrypt out in the open
A new domain pointed at our hosting has a browser-trusted certificate within minutes — issued, installed and queued for automatic renewal without anybody clicking a thing.
Multiply that example by every website on the internet and you have the concept's entire job description in one go.
Where you will meet it on our platform
You will meet it in the control panel and occasionally in a support conversation, usually already set the right way. If this term made sense, the natural next reads are SSL Certificate, HTTPS, TLS and Wildcard SSL.
SSL comes free with every plan and reissues itself before it lapses, so nobody has to diary the padlock.
Unexplained jargon is bad service
Every confusing term in hosting turns into a support ticket sooner or later, so we defined the hundred most common ones properly, once, in the plain English we would use across the counter.
What you pay on day one is what you pay at renewal, so the year-two invoice holds no surprises worth opening early.
- 100+ terms, all in plain English
- Everyday comparisons and real examples
- Related concepts linked together
- Written by the people on the desk
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Linked, never siloed
Related terms cross-reference each other, so one lookup grows into a working understanding.
Grounded in real kit
Examples point at hosting you would actually use, not at an abstract diagram.
One term, fully landed
Let's Encrypt defined, pictured by comparison and placed in your own control panel — recognise-level in a single read.
Pictures that stick
Each concept gets a comparison you will still remember at the moment you actually need it.
Plain English first
Every term defined for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — jargon translated rather than restated.
The stakes spelled out
Not only what it is, but when it turns out to be the answer to a problem you are having.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Find it in your own account
Open the control panel and find where this concept lives — seeing it attached to your own site is what turns a definition into understanding.
- 2
Check what the defaults are
Our platform ships sensible defaults for this — check rather than assume, and you will know your setup instead of hoping about it.
- 3
Follow the terms next door
Concepts travel in packs — SSL Certificate, HTTPS and TLS finish this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for your own client
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- Mailboxes that carry your own domain name
- WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
- One-click installs for WordPress and 400+ other applications
- A domain free for year one when you order annually
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Is a free Let's Encrypt certificate any weaker than a paid one?
Not in any way that affects the encryption. Same ciphers, same browser trust, same padlock. What paid certificates add is deeper validation of your organisation, warranty cover and easier wildcard handling. Those are procurement features, not stronger locks.
Why do these certificates only last for 90 days?
Two reasons, both deliberate. A stolen certificate is worth much less when it expires soon, and a short cycle forces renewal automation to exist and to be exercised often enough that you find out it works. On managed hosting you never see the cycle at all, which is the design working as intended.
Is there a refund if it does not suit?
Yes — thirty days. Put the hosting through real work, and if it is not right, ask for the money back and you get it; there is no retention script to survive first. Domain registrations are the one carve-out, because registries take that fee the moment the name is placed.
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.
Does the price climb when the term is up?
No. What you pay to order is what you pay to renew, year after year. We do not run teaser rates, so there is no year-two ambush waiting in the calendar, and your bookkeeping can treat the hosting line as a fixed number.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
Can I test changes somewhere safe first?
Yes — plans with staging let you clone the live site, work on the copy, then push it across when you are satisfied. It is the difference between hoping an update behaves and knowing that it does before any customer meets it.
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