Digital Certificates
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SSL is normally used in tandem with a Digital Certificate. A Digital Certificate gives your customers the assurance that your Web site is legitimately yours and not that of an impostor. It contains information about who owns the certificate (company name, domain name, contact address, etc.) as well as information about the issuing Certificate Authority (VeriSign, thawte, etc). It also provides you with a legal basis to perform transactions on the Internet.

The secure Web server you order from us has a Digital Certificate embedded in the httpsd binary. Because the Digital Certificate is embedded in the secure Web server binary, you can only support one Digital Certificate per Virtual Private Server. Therefore, your Virtual Subhosting customers which share the same Virtual Private Server must also share the same Digital Certificate.

The Default Digital Certificate

The default Digital Certificate embedded in your secure Web server is owned by our provider but includes the securesites.com domain name instead of our domain name. It is a Thawte wildcard certificate, which allows it to be used in conjunction with any https://userid.securesites.com/ URL without generating a domain name mismatch warning.

NOTE: Thawte Digital Certificates are supported by Netscape 3.0+ and MSIE 4.0+ Web browsers. Concerning MSIE Web browser support for wildcard digital certificates, the Thawte Server Certificates FAQ contains the following information. ...Please note, however, that MSIE does not implement wildcard certificate name checking. Our own testing suggests that wildcards work with IE 4.0 and IE 5.0. Microsoft officially disapproves of wildcards, so we cannot guarantee that wildcarding will work with any Microsoft product for any period of time. We suggest you test this prior to making your request.

When you order SSL we will create a canonical securesites.com domain name that points to your Virtual Private Server, like this:

ACCOUNT-NAME.securesites.com

NOTE: A canonical securesites.com domain name is only automatically added once, when you order SSL for your Virtual Private Server. If you wish to have additional canonical securesites.com domain names pointing to the same Virtual Private Server, these must be ordered separately.

For example, the canonical securesites.com domain name for the Virtual Private Server with the account name its is:

its.securesites.com

The surfutah secure Web site can be accessed using this URL:

https://its.securesites.com/

An ordering CGI can be accessed using HTML like this:

<form method="POST" action="https://its.securesites.com/cgi-bin/order.cgi">        

You may set up a similar service for all subhosted domains on your server by ordering your own Thawte wildcard certificate for your domain name.

VeriSign and Thawte Digital Certificates

If you wish to obtain and install your own VeriSign or Thawte Digital Certificate, see:

• Obtaining a Digital Certificate from VeriSign or Thawte
• Installing a Digital Certificate on Your Virtual Private Server

Please note: the information on this page applies to ITS web hosting plans. It may or may not apply to other environments. If you are looking for a feature described here, or better support from your hosting provider, please consider hosting your site with ITS!

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