Problem with Letsencrypt certs on Blacknight Shared Hosting

So this might actually apply to more than just Blacknight’s shared hosting but I’ve been using letsencrypt to generate SSL certs for a while now. I’m going to guess when I recently upgraded things with certbot the generation tool everything went to hell. I had certbot setup in two locations though so I just generated from the second place. Well I updated there too and everything went to hell.

Of course you can say just buy a cert? Well when it’s for simple sites that starts to add up. I gave zerossl.com a try and I ended up hitting the limit of 3? SSL certs (you can’t renew them on the free plan) Again they have a paid option at 10 quid a month (to generate free certs) I said no I’ve got to sort this

Of course Blacknight don’t support issues with letsencrypt (fair enough they want to sell certs). Their system however also won’t generate them for you which is rather annoying I believe cpanel would?.

So I’m generating certs … I’m checking if they’ve been naughty or nice and I can’t for the life of me figure out the issue … everything seems to be fine

With research it eventually hits me the algorithms being used by default aren’t supported by the Blacknight control panel.

Plesk or Parallels (At least the versions they are using .. the old control panel shows copyright 2018)? doesn’t like ECDSA Signature with SHA-384 (Which now appears to be the default) it’s looking for SHA-256 with RSA Encryption (possibly others but this ends up working for me)

You are going to want to add an extra option to your cert generation

--key-type rsa

This ends up making your new command something along the lines of (if you’re doing the base domain and the www. prefix)

certbot certonly --manual --key-type rsa -d domain.xyz -d www.domain.xyz

You’ll still want to upload the verification key to your domain’s .well-known/acme-challenge folder when generating your certs

Hope that ends up helping someone.

Installing the cert is the standard process on Blacknight shared hosting and you can find details here

I spent too long trying to figure out what the hell was going on so hopefully this saves people some time 🙂 (but surely the error messages helped when trying to add them to blacknight .. YEAH RIGHT 😀 )

Error ID 582792561925 (or something similar)

Not to mention things blowing up to give the below image