EasyWP PositiveSSL With External Domain

Having recently dipped my toes into the world of WordPress once again, I needed to find where to a host a new WordPress site. WordPress hosting tends to be a bit tricky because it can easily become quite expensive if you don’t want to take on ownership of doing a WordPress install of your own and managing the host… which I most certainly didn’t want to do.

However, I also didn’t want to be forced to pay an absurd amount for sites that are looking to get thousands of hits per month, not hundreds of thousands. WordPress.com, for example, charges $25 per month if paying annually. WP Engine will run $20 a month. I was initially setting up a business site for my SO, so I wanted to keep the cost (relatively) low. In fact, my original idea was just to create her site from scratch with static HTML, CSS, and (if needed) a little JavaScript so that I could host it for free via something like Netlify. My SO wanted to maintain a blog on the site to help drive traffic to her business, though, so I really needed a CMS.

Similar to some WordPress hosting, I also find things like Duda to be prohibitively expensive, and I think Squarespace is both overpriced and generates ugly-looking sites. When I previously maintained a WordPress site, I used EasyWP from Namecheap. The prices are quite competitive, even before factoring in the discount they offer on the first year. It’s also worth mentioning that this discount applies per site, so when I set up a second site (this one… that’s another post for another time) I received the same discount.

My big question is that EasyWP offers a free SSL certificate from PositiveSSL. It can set up and manage the certificate on my behalf because it’s assumed to be for a domain that Namecheap manages. That was how I operated previously, but my registrar choices have changed since then. I’ve since moved my domains to Porkbun, and I was curious if I would still be able to leverage the free certificate even if the domain was registered elsewhere.

It took a bit of digging for me to find an answer, but ultimately it was a “yes.” It makes sense in hindsight, but the key is that Namecheap must manage the DNS.

The Free PositiveSSL feature is supported by Namecheap domains. However, the domains which are registered with another Registrar can use the Free PositiveSSL feature as well. It can be done only if the domain has our FreeDNS and it is added to the EasyWP dashboard using the Your Domain on Namecheap option.

EasyWP documentation.

While it would be nice to manage all of my DNS records in one place, I’m used to not doing that. The DNS for my main site, for example, uses Cloudflare for its nameservers. Setting up FreeDNS from namecheap was easy enough, though the order of operations threw me for a bit of a loop. When registering my domain, FreeDNS will give me the NS records I need to use. My first instinct was to set those immediately as my nameservers in Porkbun. However, FreeDNS then gives me a TXT record that I needed to create with my existing DNS infrastructure as a verification. So I had to re-set my NS records in Porkbun, create the TXT record, wait for Namecheap to see that record, and then flip the NS records back to FreeDNS. It’s easy enough, but due to the nature of DNS, it takes a little bit of time.

Once I had FreeDNS in place and working, then setting up EasyWP was the same as doing it with a domain registered through Namecheap. My domain shows up in the list when creating a new WordPress site, and EasyWP is able to generate and manage a shiny new SSL certificate for it as well. Now to re-learn how to do things with WordPress.