Creating Free SSL Certificates For Windows Server Using Let’s Encrypt

I usually need SSL certificates for staging and production environments. For a long time creating self-signed digital certificates was the only option if you were not willing to spend money for it.

Well, not any more. Let’s Encrypt is a non-profit CA (certificate authority) which provides free digital certificates to enable SSL.

In this guide I’ll try to explain how to get a SSL certificate for my staging Windows 2016 server. The server is a virtual machine created in Azure. If you are using Azure Virtual Machines you can setup a free DNS name for that server. This means once you setup IIS on that server you can access your websites in that server via that domain name instead of the IP address.

There are many ways of generating SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt. In this post I’ll use SSL For Free to obtain the certificates for my domain.

First right your domain name (the one you get from Azure Virtual Machine) and click “Create Free SSL Certificate” button.

You have 3 options to verify that you own the domain. I chose “Manual Verification” since I have a…