Do I need a wildcard SSL certificate to secure my website and email subdomains through cPanel?

Question

I have a website and emails through the same hosting provider which I manage through cpanel.

At the moment I am using zeroSSL to secure my website (www.example.com), however, this does not support my other subdomains such as cpanel, webdisk, autodescover, webmail and mail.mydomainname.

I tried creating another certificate for mail.example.com but in cpanel it appears you cannot have different certificates for different subdomains.

So the question is do I need a wildcard SSL certificate or is there a better way to secure my emails?

Answer 1

There are multiple aspects to the question -

You can use a wildcard cert, and that may be a good idea in this circumstance. It is also possible to use a single cert with multiple "subject alt names" - ie. 1 cert that covers many domain names.

That said, I've never really understood using cPanel or a web server for email. Email is orthogonal to web hosting and requires a different skill set and tools to do well. Id be inclined to send my mail to a system designed to handle email - eg outlook, gmail or a provider that specializes in that. To send mail to a different server you just need to modify your DNS appropriately.

Answer 2

As @Steve said, you can use the Let's Encrypt plugin of cPanel. If you don't know how to install or activate it, follow the instructions on the cPanel documentation.

https://docs.cpanel.net/knowledge-base/third-party/the-lets-encrypt-plugin/86/