About 7 pm PDT this evening, FamilyRootsPublishing.com started coming up as “insecure” on the web. It seems that the SSL certificate ran out today – and although I was promised by my hosting service on September 26 that it was going to auto-renew today, it did not. Someone forgot to mark the site SSL as “autorenew.” A customer emailed me a few minutes ago, telling me that I had an issue. If he hadn’t done so, this could have gone on until morning, as I had no reason to check the site again this evening.
Once I contacted Bluehost about the problem, we were back up as “secure” about 15 minutes later. The tech that fixed the problem told me it could take up to two hours – which scared me, but good!
The plan which I have with Bluehost includes a “free SSL Certificate.” I had a bad feeling about the auto-renewal last month, as my cPanel was sending me messages that my certificate was going to expire. However, I was assured that there was nothing to worry about!
The gentleman that helped me this evening did all he could – even if it was after the fact. He expedited getting us back online, and threw in 3 months of free hosting. He also assured me that it would “auto-renew” again next year – without my intervention. However, the morning of October 15, 2019 I’m going to make a phone call and make sure that all is well.
Goodness – I have no idea how many sales we lost this evening… I think I’d better extend our pre-pub promo on the German Residential Records book – as that’s been the big seller this afternoon. If you tried to order while we were “away,” please try again.
