SSL Certificate CSR Creation

Create a CSR (SSL Certificate Signing Request)

General CSR Creation Guidelines

Before you can order your SSL Certificate, you must first generate a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) on your server. A CSR is an encrypted body of text. Your CSR will contain encoded information specific to your company and domain name; this information is known as a Distinguished Name or DN.

In the DN for most servers are the following fields: Country, State (or Province), Locality (or City), Organization, Organizational Unit, and Common Name. Please note:

1) The Country is a two-digit code -- for the United States, it's 'US'. For countries outside of the United States, see our listing of SSL Certificate Country Codes.

2) State and Locality are full names, i.e. 'California', 'Los Angeles'.

3) The Organization Name is your Full Legal Company or Personal Name, as legally registered in your locality.

4) The Organizational Unit is whichever branch of your company is ordering the certificate such as accounting, marketing, etc.

5) The Common Name is the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for which you are requesting the ssl certificate.

Please note: Unless you are purchasing a WildCard Certificate, your certificate is only good for the exact domain you list, and additional subdomains will not be secured. For example, if you register www.digicert.com, then subdomains like sales.digicert.com, secure.digicert.com, and members.digicert.com will NOT be secure. If you want to secure a specific subdomain, enter the entire Fully Qualified Domain Name as your Common Name.

Once your CSR is created, you will be able to simply copy and paste it into the online order form.

« Specific CSR Creation Instructions can be obtained in the left column (click your Servers Software Platform to view detailed instructions)

Generating a CSR for Issuance of an SSL Certificate

How to generate a Certificate Signing Request for your Web Server