Last year I installed SSL certificate from hostgator on my discourse forum hosted at Digital ocean. The certificate has expired and now I can not even access my forum and the site at https://ask.mybloggertricks.com/ reads:
This site can’t be reached
The webpage at https://ask.mybloggertricks.com/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
ERR_FAILED
Please guide me how to permanently remove HTTPs and get back to normal HTTP site as I no more wish to pay $100 for hostgator’s stupid SSL service.
Update
In July 2018 hostgator has added support for free SSL for all existing and new accounts. I have installed SSL for free on all my sites and will now try installing it on discourse also. I am really pleased Hostgator made a sane decision finally and helped webmasters save $100 a year!
You can use Firefox browser to bypass certificate check (via Add exception), then go to site settings to disable SSL (lookup force https in settings).
Then you can get someone to fix up your certificate on your Digital ocean instance which is matter of properly configuring nginx or apache web server. I recommend buying and installing another (cheaper) certificate. “Normal” http is no longer normal or standard in 2019. SSL is a must!
The simplest answer is to stop the container, rename app.yml, make a note or your smtp settings, and run discourse-setup to enable https with a free certificate.
I succeeded in disabling through discourse force https method and using firefox.
Unfortunately my domain is hosted with Hostgator and hostgator does not support let’s encrypt and instead its expensive wildcard ssl package that costs over $100.
How are HostGator blocking Letsencrypt? It doesn’t depend on anything on the server, issuance is done within the container over a standard web port (:80)
It sounds like there is a cpanel plug-in for Let’s Encrypt that HostGator won’t install (or so the internet tells me) - I assume you should be able to do it with SSH, but I don’t know much about HostGator…
I wasn’t saying CPanel matters, just pointing out why OP is saying HostGator is blocking Let’s Encrypt.
Given that it sounds like @Mohammad got someone else to install Discourse, I was also working on the assumption they aren’t familiar with SSHing in to the server to work directly on Discourse, so installing a SSL cert in CPanel is going to be the way they want to do it, rather than at the discourse level. This might be a bad assumption.
If my instructions above aren’t explicit enough and I did your install (I can’t find a record of your name) I’ll fix it for $150. If you don’t still have it, my contact info is in my profile.
