Hosting A secure website with letsencrypt(free TLScertificate)

Learning Outcomes:

- Hosting a website

- creating certificates 

- understanding domain name resolution

- CNAME, A, AAAA DNS records

- Cloud computing

Now lets start hosting our website.

Understanding::

Step1:

 Buying a domain

 We have many websites to buy a domain(godaddy, domain.com, etc),

 I used domain.com.

Step2:

 

Lets go for hosting

Here I used cloud computer, (sine, I have found it easy and convenient) or you can use your own infrastructure for hosting.

Here I  used digitalocean droplet as my server.

How to set up a server on digital ocean?

Here are the  steps:

1. Go to digitalocean.com

2. Sign up

3. Create your project

4. After creating project, click on create a droplet.(here droplet is nothing but a virtualmachine)

5. Select the distribution and choose a plan, here I chose minimum plan. 

6. But, go to Marketplace  to choose a distribution with a required software. select  wordpress on ubuntu(best for web hosting)  

7. You can configure additional settings but, I am going with basic settings required for hosting.

8. Now selecting type of authentication. Here it is better to choose ssh key for safer  authentication since only you can get the ssh access.

9. After selecting the ssh key, upload your public key into the dropbox, and click continue. (you can get your public key in mac or linux distributions—terminal> cd /home/USERNAME>cd  .ssh> click the file containing  .pub(eg. Id_rsa.pub) )

10. If you choose password authentication, configure a password and click create droplet

11. Done! You have created your first cloud computer.

12. This is  going to be our web server.

13. Once created you can click at your droplet get its public ip to gain console.

14. Note here itself you can turn off/on your cloud computer.

Step3:

a. Now go back to domain.com and configure your nameserver. 

b. For digitalocean it is ns1digitalocean.com, ns2digitalocean.com.

c. Come back to digitalocean.com and o your droplet page click – create>Domain/DNS>Add a domain

d. Here you add your domain name.

Step4:

1. Now click on your domain added below

2. Create a new record

3. Now redirect www.yourdomainname to your servers public ipv4(it should be  a A record)

(AAAA is used when you have a ipv6 addr)

4. If you want to redirect www.yourrdomainname to yourdomainname  then instead of  A record click on CNAME and redirect.

Step5:

1. Now its time to check whether it works or not

2. Open terminal and type-  nslookup yourdomainname 

3. If this will show the ip address of your server then it works!(note it will take time for DNS to get updated, hence you wont see this immediately)

4. If not then try  step4  on domain.com(where you purchased your domain)

  

Step6:   (note step 6 should be done only when nslookup shows your server ip addr)

Getting certificate

1. In this blog we are getting  a free certificate by lets encrypt

2. Now log on to your server, Terminal/cmd>type – ssh root@ipaddrofserver

3. This will log you without any password if you provided your public key in step2

4. Now go with the basic configurations

5. When the server asks for letsencrypt certificate type yes

6. Then it asks for which website , then you select both www.yourdomainname and  yourdomainname 

7. Then type yes for redirection from http---https(if prompts)

8. Done! We have got our TLS certificate

(if this step fails you can implement manualy  by refering to certbot.eff.org )

STEP7:

FINAL CHECK

Open a web browser and type in your domain name

It will direct to our webpage hosted on your server , even you can check the certificate.

Checking certificate

1) On web browser

2) In your server

                                 Type the command --- cd /var/letsencrypt/live/yourdomainname

here you will find your certificate and servers private key.