Applying for a Free SSL Certificate on Tencent Cloud

Introduction

The barrier and cost of applying for SSL certificates have dropped significantly. Many organizations now offer free encryption certificates. One of the most well-known is Let’s Encrypt — free, automated, and open. Domestic cloud providers in China also offer free SSL certificates. Below are the steps I followed to apply for an SSL certificate on Tencent Cloud.

Steps

1. Go to the Tencent Cloud SSL Certificate Management page and click Apply for Free Certificate, as shown below:

2. Currently, the free certificate available on Tencent Cloud is from TRUSTAsia. Select it and confirm, as shown below:

3. Next, fill in the required certificate information. It’s straightforward — there are only 2 required fields:

   1. Common Name — the specific single domain name. (❗ e.g., www.ewhisper.cn, blog.ewhisper.cn. Wildcard domains like .ewhisper.cn are not supported.)
   2. Email address

4. Next is domain identity verification. If you’re using the full Tencent Cloud suite, simply select Automatic DNS Verification.

5. That completes the application. Now just wait for the review. My SSL certificate was approved very quickly — it only took about ten minutes. As shown below:

6. Certificate details are as follows:

7. The certificate information list is shown below. The certificate is valid for one year. You can deploy it to CDN and load balancers (if available), or download it and deploy it to Nginx.

8. The download is a certificate archive containing certificate types for various web servers:

   1. Apache: key, crt, and bundle.crt
   2. IIS: pfx
   3. Nginx: crt, key
   4. Tomcat: jks

9. Next up is the Nginx configuration. 🎉🎉🎉