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Digital Certificates
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 Server. Therefore, your
Virtual Subhosting customers
which share the same Virtual 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 us 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 http://wildcard.securesites.com/ URL
without generating a domain name mismatch warning.
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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.
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When you order SSL we will create a canonical securesites.com domain name
that points to your Virtual Server, like this:
ACCOUNT-NAME.securesites.com
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NOTE:
A canonical securesites.com domain name is only automatically added once, when
you order SSL for your Virtual Server. If you wish to have additional canonical securesites.com domain names
pointing to the same Virtual Server, these must be ordered separately.
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For example, the canonical securesites.com domain name for the Virtual
Server with the account name "iaswww" is:
iaswww.securesites.com
The "iaswww" secure Web site can be accessed using this URL:
https://iaswww.securesites.com/
An ordering CGI can be accessed using HTML like this:
<form method="POST"
action="https://iaswww.securesites.com/cgi-bin/order.cgi">
You may setup a similar service for your clients 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:
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