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Support Area: SSL

Control Center icon:

Using the Free Server-wide Certificate
Purchasing a GeoTrust SSL certificate for your site
Using Your Own 3rd-party Certificate

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Using the server certificate

Overview

We have SSL Secure Server certificates installed on all our servers from GeoTrust, a leader in encryption verification. To call a file securely, you just need to pipe it through the server certificate. This means that the path will change for a secure document, even though the location might be the same.

For example, if you have a page called 'order.htm' and you wish to call it securely, you still upload it to the same location as your other files (domain-www) but the link you use will be different.

Linking instructions

The path for a secure document is:

https://<hostname>/[domain]/file.ext

The <hostname> is the name of the server you are hosted on. You can find this information from the Account Management icon in your Control Center (look under "hosting server" in the "Account Information" section at the top).

The [domain] is your domain name without the 'www' or '.com'.

So if your domain is www.xyz.com and you are hosted on server 'host12.globalnameservers.com' the SSL path to your order form would be this:

https://host12.globalnameservers.com/xyz/order.htm

Note: If you have images on your secure page make sure to also link to them via the secure method or your visitors may see a warning about insecure content in their browsers!

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Purchasing a GeoTrust QuickSSL certificate for your site

We've made it easy (and affordable) to purchase your own 128-bit SSL certificates right from your Control Center! Here's how it works:

- You begin by clicking the GeoTrust SSL tool in your Control Center. You will see a menu of 4 choices, only the first 3 are of consequence to you:

Step 1: Generate or Review Your Certificate Signing Request (CSR).
Step 2: Order your Certificate.
Step 3: Install your Certificate.

- Choose Step 1. You will be asked to enter information in order to generate the CSR including a password, city, state (not abbreviated), etc. Also - make sure the name of the domain is the way you want it. You may for instance want the www in front of the secure name. Keep in mind that the secure path will be https://[whatever is in the "domain name" box]!

- After generating the CSR you will see a screen that says:
"You have successfully generated your Certificate Signing Request (CSR) and are now ready to submit your order for your actual Secure Certificate."

- Choose "Order" and you will be brought to a screen where you will place the actual purchase order. You can choose terms of 1, 2, or 3 years for your certificates. The prices are $99 for 1 year, $169 for 2 years or $229 for 3 years (best value).

- Once ordered, you will receive an email which contains a link to GeoTrust to continue the order. Once there you will need to select a verification address. The addresses listed are generated from your domain registration information, and you can also have approval emails sent to certain addresses at your domain (such as admin@yourdomain.com, webmaster@yourdomain.com, etc) in case your main email is no longer valid.

- Once you select the approval email, you will receive the approval request with a link in it. Click the link and indicate that you approve of the order.

- Within a few minutes, you should receive an email with the certificate text contained in it.

- Copy the certificate and using choice 3 (Install Your Certificate) and paste it into the box provided. Make sure not to paste any extra spaces or characters.

- That's it! The certificate will be in force within 10 minutes after you install it.

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Using your own 3rd-party certificate

If you have your own certificate, or wish to purchase one from a vendor other than GeoTrust, you may be able to use it on our servers. We currently support SSL certificates from Thawte, Verisign, Entrust, and OpenSRS as well as GeoTrust (formerly Equifax).

Once you receive your certificate, you can use option #4 in the GeoTrust SSL tool, "Install your non-GeoTrust Certificate", and follow the prompts.

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