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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 (GeoTrust, VeriSign, 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 us but includes the securesites.com domain name instead of our domain name. It is a GeoTrust wildcard certificate, which allows it to be used in conjunction with any https://wildcard.securesites.com/ URL without generating a domain name mismatch warning.

NOTE: Digital Certificates are supported by MSIE 4.0+, Netscape 3.0+, Opera, and many other modern Web browsers.

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 surfutah is:

surfutah.securesites.com

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

https://surfutah.securesites.com/

An ordering CGI can be accessed using HTML like this:

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

You may set up a similar service for your clients by ordering your own Thawte wildcard certificate for your domain name.