Bluehost Web Hosting Help

SSL Installation of 3rd Party Certificate

The following article is intended for those using our Shared hosting services. If you are using our VPS or Dedicated hosting then you should follow the steps in the article VPS or Dedicated Hosting - Installing an SSL Certificate for a Website

Summary

You are able to use 3rd party SSL Certificates with your hosting service. This article will explain how to generate the Key and CSR to be used in generating the SSL Certificate.

Please note that you will need a dedicated IP address before you are able to add an SSL Certificate to your account. You can add a dedicated IP address to your hosting service from the Addons section of your Control Panel.

Generate a Private Key

To generate a self-signed certificate, simply follow these instructions:

Steps to Generate a Key:

From within your cPanel, click on TLS/SSL Manager icon.
Click on "Generate, view, upload, or delete your private keys"
Under the Generate a New Key section select Key Size 2048 or 1024
Press the Generate button
Your private key will be displayed. Click "Return to SSL Manager"
Back in the SSL Manager page, click "Generate, view, or delete SSL certificate signing requests."
Enter the domain and the required information into the form.
Press Generate button.
If you have entered valid information, you will be shown your Generated Private Key. (if it looks blank, click back and correct any information)
The pass phrase is a challenge password used by Apache (on our server) at startup to decrypt your SSL private key.

Create the Certificate Signing Request

Steps to Generate a CSR:

In the SSL Manager page, click "Generate, view, or delete SSL certificate signing requests."
Enter the domain and the required information into the form.
Press Generate button.
If you have entered valid information, you will be shown your CSR. (if it looks blank, click back and correct any information)
Provide the CSR to the SSL vendor of your choice. They will exchange it for a CRT file.
With the new CRT, return to SSL Manager and click the "Generate, view, upload, or delete SSL certificates".
Paste in the provided CRT file or Browse your computer for the .crt file. Repeat for CA Bundle file, if received as well.
Press Upload button
Contact us via Phone or Live Chat to request your KEY and CRT be installed on the server.

The KEY as well as the CRT will be required when we install your certificate on the server (and a CA Bundle if provided by SSL vendor). It is recommended to keep a backup copy of each of these as they may be used for this particular domain name with any host.

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