We are excited to announce the release of one of our key 2020 roadmap features: an integration with Let's Encrypt to provide free, autorenewing SSL certificates to all of our customers with private domains.
You're always encouraged to set up a private domain for your knowledge base, so that instead of having a mykb.knowledgeowl.com subdomain, you can use something like help.mycompany.com. If your main company website is served over https:, then we need an SSL certificate to be able to handle your private domain over https:.
Previously, the setup for this involved a lot of work: customers had to download their own certificates, then upload the details to KnowledgeOwl, and then we had to do some manual work to finish the setup. That took some work, and if your SSL cert was in an unusual format, it could take several days and many emails to get things set up properly. It also meant that customers needed to remember when their own certificates expired.
We've never liked this process. One of our goals for 2020 was to deliver a more automated, less painful SSL certificate setup process to our customers.
We've integrated with Let's Encrypt to provide nearly instantaneous, free, auto-renewing SSL certs directly to all of our customers. The certificates will renew themselves automatically for as long as you are a KnowledgeOwl customer, and the setup only requires that you have the correct CNAME record configured on your DNS--a requirement for using private domains at all.
With the CNAME entry in place and validating, you can get your private domain and SSL cert fully set up in under 10 minutes.
If you've been thinking of using a private domain but have been intimidated by the SSL certificate process, please go check out the docs and get yours set up today!
What if I already have a non-Let's Encrypt SSL cert for my private domain?
Your SSL certificate will continue to work until it expires.
You're welcome to switch to a Let's Encrypt SSL cert at any time by following the private domain setup instructions. The transition should be seamless. If you don't see the new certificate show up:
- Have more than 10-15 minutes passed? It can take a few minutes for the certificate to switch over to the new one
- Clear your cookies and do a hard refresh; recheck the cert after
If you're still not seeing the knowledge base showing the new Let's Encrypt certificate after trying both of the above, contact us and let and we'll take a look.
