I can’t tell you how happy I was the day that DreamHost, my favorite website hosting company, started selling SSL certificates. Especially since these SSL certificates were from Geotrust, a very reputable secure certificate provider. Here’s a quick tutorial that walks you through the process on how to purchase and configure the DreamHost / Geotrust SSL certificate. The tutorial assumes you already have your website hosted with DreamHost.

Follow these steps to purchase and configure your DreamHost / Geotrust SSL certificate:

1. Log into your DreamHost control panel.

2. Click on “Domains” on the left hand side.

3. Click on “Manage Domains” underneath “Domains” on the left hand side.

4. Under the column labeled “Secure Hosting”, click “Edit” for the domain you wish to purchase the SSL certificate for.

5. You’ll now be looking at a form with a bunch of different choices. Let’s go through them one by one:

• Click the box that says “Mirror Non-Secure Settings”. This will make a bunch of the choices disappear.
• Unique IP. Select how you’d like to be billed for this. All SSL certificates require your website to have an unique IP address.
• Fill out the Generate a New Certificate section with information relevant to your company.
• If I’m your web designer, you can put my name, email and phone number in the Certificate Admin section - this will help speed things up because I’ll get the email notifications.
• Billing Option: Select how you’d like to pay (don’t select “buy it elsewhere”).
• Skip over the Already Have A Secure Certificate section.
• Click the button at the bottom: “Set Up HTTPS Now!”.

6. Fill out the form to complete the purchase of your SSL. You may need to reenter your credit card information.

7. You should next receive an email from Geotrust with your order id, thanking you for your SSL certificate purchase, and telling you that another email will be sent out with installation instructions. This email has a link to Geotrust SSL support as well as their phone number (1-866-436-8787).

8. You should get another email from Geotrust, with a link to follow to review and approve your SSL certificate.

9. After you’ve reviewed and approved your SSL certificate from the above step, you’ll get a final email from Geotrust. This final email will contain a section labeled “Your Web Server Certificate:” and be followed by a bunch of code that starts with “—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–” and ends with “—–END CERTIFICATE—–”. You will need to copy and paste this code back into DreamHost to complete this process.

10. Log back into your DreamHost control, “Domains”, “Manage Domains”, “Secure Hosting”, “Edit”.

11. Scroll down to the section “Already have a secure certificate?”. See the box with the label: “Certificate: You get this from a certificate authority. It’s passed to site visitors to verify your identity.” In this box, you need to paste all the code from the email you received from Geotrust (that starts with “—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–” and ends with “—–END CERTIFICATE—–”. )

12. Click “Set up HTTPS now!” at the bottom of the page.

13. This should complete the Geotrust SSL certificate installation process on your DreamHost website. To make sure all’s working as it should, go to your website, but use the secure URL: “https://www.yourwebsite.com”, note you’re using “https” and not “http”. If you see the little padlock icon and don’t get any error messages, you can assume your SSL certificate is correctly installed. (If you have an ECT online store, I’ll need to do just a bit of configuration, so send me an email when this is done. Once the ECT store is set up with your SSL info, the store will automatically switch to the “https” secure domain when the customer gets to the first screen where they enter personal information.)

14. Since you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of getting a Geotrust SSL for your DreamHost website, it’s highly recommended that you advertise this to your website visitors - and you do this by adding the Geotrust seal at the bottom of all of your web pages. In the last email you received from Geotrust, there was a link to follow to install the seal - send this link to me (or your website designer) so it can be added to your website.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 10:49 am and is filed under the DreamHost, ECT Store, eCommerce category. Read other Aldebaran Website Design Blog articles by returning to main blog page. Need a blog added to your website? Click here to read about blog installation services or click here to contact Aldebaran Web Design.