Your SSL.com Account – Submitting a CSR

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Creating any SSL certificate requires a unique Certificate Signing Request (CSR). This article will show you how to submit a CSR and provide the other information needed to create your certificate.

Steps When Submitting Your CSR

  1. Complete and submit the CSR
  2. Confirm your domain and provide your contact information
  3. Choose a validation method
  4. Monitor your account for validation and certificate issuance
A couple of important points:

– Your CSR is really just a highly specialized text file. You will be copying and pasting the text from your CSR, so you may want to have it open in your favorite text editor before beginning this process.
– Your SSL.com account will display credits when you have purchased a certificate but have not yet submitted the CSR for that certificate:credits_001Please contact SSL.com if you have any issues with your account credits.

Submit the CSR

In your SSL.com account, you should find an unused SSL certificate credit and (typically) a matching SSL certificate with a “Waiting for CSR” status. Under “Action”, select “Submit csr”.

Step 3 - Submit CSR

Copy and paste the text of your CSR  into the “CSR” box, then select the server software you will be hosting your site on. (Your web hosting provider can help you determine this if you don’t already know.) If you do not find your software listed, simply select “Other”.

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Domain and Contact Information

Confirm the domain name is correct on the certificate request, and enter other information as requested.

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Next, enter your Administrative Contact information. You can check the provided boxes if you want to use the same information for your Billing, Technical and/or Validation contacts.

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Validation Method

Choose your validation method. Two methods are available:  email verification and file verification.

Email verification will send an email to the address in your WHOIS record for the domain, or to one of these other email addresses:

admin@yourdomain.com
administrator@yourdomain.com
hostmaster@yourdomain.com
postmaster@yourdomain.com
webmaster@yourdomain.com

Make sure the validation contact email address is accessible. A reply to the validation email must be received before your certificate can be created when using this method.

File verification will ask you to download a specially crafted verification file from your SSL.com account and place it on the “site root” of your website (see the example below).

If you are unsure of how to do this, please contact your web hosting provider for assistance in uploading this file.

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When you have selected your validation method, click Submit to send your CSR for processing.

Monitor for Validation

When you have submitted your CSR the status for that certificate will change to “Pending Validation”. You can monitor the status of any certificate order through your SSL.com account portal.

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If you chose email validation, watch for and reply to the message sent to verify your order. If you are using file verification, or have already replied to a verification email,  just watch for a message confirming that your certificate is ready for installation.

As always, if you have any questions or need assistance just contact us at SSL.com.