SSL certificate activation .well-known path error

I have a domain www.example.com. I tried to use the free SSL cert from here. I need to manually verify the domain. No matter what I do I get an error. The requested URL was not found on this server. The host is an Apache server.

This does not work:

http://example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/VxYzsfbq97eTV2xuzczx6rrvr03Qigki5QG9Bj8dWLE

But this works:

http://example.com/well-known/acme-challenge/VxYzsfbq97eTV2xuzczx6rrvr03Qigki5QG9Bj8dWLE

As you can see the only difference is the fullstop . in front of well-known. What would cause this issue? A path issue? Perhaps it's on the hosting company's side?