Letsencrypt renewal nightmare

My le renewal cron failed, I just tired to renew it manually and got

ee site update site.com --le=renew
Renewing SSl cert for https://site.com
ERROR : Cannot RENEW SSL cert !
Your current cert already EXPIRED !
Check logs for reason tail /var/log/ee/ee.log & Try Again!!!

I tried setting le=off and removing nginx ssl files as well as those for the site in /etc/letsencrypt now I get

Unable to setup, Let’s Encrypt
Please make sure that your site is pointed to
same server on which you are running Let’s Encrypt Client
to allow it to verify the site automatically.

Certbot has problem setting up the virtual environment.

We were not be able to guess the right solution from your pip
output.

Consult https://certbot.eff.org/docs/install.html#problems-with-python-virtual-environment
for possible solutions.
You may also find some support resources at https://certbot.eff.org/support/ .
,
Command Error:
2019-01-23 20:26:02,387 (ERROR) ee : Unable to setup, Let’s Encrypt
2019-01-23 20:26:02,387 (ERROR) ee : Please make sure that your site is pointed to
same server on which you are running Let’s Encrypt Client
to allow it to verify the site automatically.

Nothing on the server or dns has changed?

All day I suffered with same problem until I followed the instructions from this page: https://certbot.eff.org/lets-encrypt/ubuntuartful-nginx

First install:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ sudo add-apt-repository universe
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python-certbot-nginx

and then

$ sudo certbot --nginx

In my case, I used the following command. Seems that pip.conf is not trusted by certbot :
sudo rm /etc/pip.conf
This solved my problem. Hope this helps