Transport Layer Security (TLS) plays a crucial role in protecting your website’s data and user privacy.
Outdated TLS versions—like 1.0 and 1.1—are no longer considered secure and may cause compatibility issues with browsers, APIs, or payment gateways.
To keep your applications safe and compliant, it's important to update your server’s TLS settings to the latest supported versions.
This guide shows you how to easily check, update, and verify the TLS version on your Cloudways server—no complex configurations needed.
Table of Contents:
Understanding TLS: The Foundation of Secure Web Communication
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol that ensures secure communication between two devices over a network.
It provides authentication, data integrity, and encryption, making sure that the data exchanged between a browser and a web server remains private and tamper-proof.
TLS is the backbone of secure browsing and is widely used across websites, web applications, email, and messaging platforms.
Why Do I Need TLS?
Without proper security measures, your website is very likely to get compromised, which can be very harmful to your site audience as well.
If you run an online business or your site processes sensitive information such as financial and banking information; then, there should be no flaws in your site security; therefore, Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards also recommend setting minimum TLS versions to v1.2 or newer to safeguard payment data.
Nowadays, many services such as PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, FedEx, UPS, and many other services refuse TLS v1.0 connections.
This means it is better to use newer TLS versions as well to avoid any future issues with 3rd party providers.
In May 2020, Google has also announced that they will be updating their page ranking criteria to look at page experience metrics, one such important factor will be security, thus making it vital that your page is running the latest in security trends.
Tip:
Learn more about how does the TLS work, its impact on SEO, and why do you need SSL/TLS in this article.
Does Cloudways Support TLS 1.3?
Definitely yes, we currently support all the TLS versions, including the latest TLS 1.3 on all the servers across our server farm and Cloudways CDN.
Previous TLS versions had security flaws, which may lead you to fail in providing a trusted and secure environment to your potential visitors where they feel confident in doing business with you.
You have nothing to worry about if you are a Cloudways client because you can effortlessly update the TLS version using the Cloudways Platform in just a few clicks instead of editing the server configuration files.
How to Update the TLS Version
The following steps will demonstrate how you can change your TLS version in just a few clicks.
This feature of updating TLS versions is currently unavailable for Debian 7 servers; however, it is available on all the servers with the Debian 8, Debian 9, Debian 10, and Debian 11 distributions.
Important:
Disabling outdated TLS versions like TLS 1.0 and 1.1 enhances security by protecting your server and users from known vulnerabilities. However, proceed with caution—doing so may block access for visitors using outdated software such as Android 4.4 or earlier, Internet Explorer 10 or older, Windows 7, and other legacy systems that do not support newer TLS versions.
Step #1 — Navigate to Server Settings and Packages:
Log in to your Cloudways Platform using your email address and password.
From the top menu bar, open Servers.
Then, select the desired server.
Under Server Management, select Settings and Packages.
Navigate to the Advanced tab.
Step #2 — Updating TLS Version:
Scroll down to the Nginx block. Under TLS Versions, you will see the TLS protocol version(s) currently selected. To update the protocol, simply click edit.
Next, choose your desired protocol based on your requirements and hit Save Changes. Please note that you can not disable TLS v1.3.
Note:
It is a server-level configuration; thus, your selected TLS protocols will apply to all the applications deployed on the same server.
How to Verify the TLS Version
You can use any third-party tool or service to verify the TLS version. You can use CDN77.
You have learned how to update the TLS version. Please note that if you clone your server, then you need to select the TLS version for the new cloned server as these configurations are not replicated.
That’s it! We hope this article was helpful.
Need Help?
If you need assistance, feel free to:
Visit the Cloudways Support Center
Chat with us: Need a Hand > Send us a Message
Or create a support ticket anytime.
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