Running Your Site with a Certificate from a Certificate Authority

Abstract

In this chapter, you will upgrade your site, which so far implements HTTPS with a self-signed certificate, by obtaining an SSL certificate from a certificate authority (CA). As a result, the web browser warnings about an insecure site will not appear, and instead a padlock icon, indicating secure communication, will appear on the left of the URL in the address bar of your browser. To obtain an SSL certificate, you usually need to own a second-level domain (SLD), like httpsserver in httpsserver.eu, as opposed to a name with the second-level domain owned by a DDNS company (like the names used in the previous chapters with the SLD ddns.net ). For this reason, in this chapter, you’ll learn how to obtain a domain name, and I’ll discuss the process to obtain both the domain name and the SSL certificate. The cost at the time of this writing is about $8/year for the domain name and $19/year for the SSL certificate. However, it is not required that you register to run the projects. The source code for the projects used in this and the following chapter can run with the old server configuration; you will just continue to get the browser warnings.