SSL Certificate Requirements

An SSL Certificate protects your customers data in transit to and from your web server and permits them to identify your server based on the trust placed on the issuing Certificate Authority (CA).
This requires differing degrees of verification according to the certificate (e.g. Extended Verification) and consequently the generation process can vary between minutes and much longer.

When ordering the SSL certificate you will need basic information pertaining to your domain and for the quick/rapid/instant type 2 email addresses. One email address is defined by you and is the destination when the certificate is finally generated, verified and dispatched from the CA. The second email address will be

- The email address associated with your WHOIS contact (if you are unsure, you can check this address by searching the WHOIS database at www.nic.com).

- A generic email address such as admin@yourdomain.com, webmaster@yourdomain.com, root@yourdomain.com, etc.

and must be selected from a list defined by the CA to establish that you have administrative authority for the domain. Ensure you can receive email to one of such addresses since an Approval request will be sent to it as the final step before the SSL certificate is shipped.

You have to own the domain!

The very core of the SSL cert process requires you to generate a Private key and based on that, a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). This process depends on the operating system you are running the web server on and where such files are then located on the server again depends on the operating system and web server sotftware. If you have specific questions contact Tech Support via a help system ticket from your account.

Note that SSL certificates are commonly thought of as being used just for web servers (e.g. https:// ) but they can be used for email in much the same way.

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