Purchase a professionally-signed SSL certificate

This article only explains how to purchase a Professionally-Signed SSL certificate in your DreamHost panel. This type of certificate costs $15/year and is signed by Sectigo, displaying a certificate seal of trust on your site.

This type of certificate is recommended for eCommerce sites, customer login areas, or any other site that transmit sensitive information.

Confirmation email address

Before you begin the process to purchase an SSL certificate, make sure you have already created a confirmation email address on your domain. This email may be necessary to finalize the purchase.

This email must be an address on your domain. For example, if your website is example.com, make sure you have already created one of the following addresses:

• admin@example.com
• administrator@example.com
• hostmaster@example.com
• postmaster@example.com
• webmaster@example.com

View the following article for instructions on how to create an email address:

• Add an email address

1. Navigate to the Secure Certificates page.

   

2. To the right of your domain, click the Add button.

   

3. Choose the option to add a $15 Sectigo certificate and then click the Select this Certificate button.

   

4. Enter your personal and website information.
   • You must fill in ALL of the fields (including the 'Organization name') in order to successfully proceed to the next step. If you don't have an organization name, then enter your first and last name. 'Street 2' and 'Street 3' are optional fields—you can leave those blank if your address does not include any of this info (such as an apt. #).
   • This information is used to generate the Certificate Signing Request (CSR) that is used to generate your new professionally-signed SSL certificate.
   Click the Proceed to Next Step button when finished.

   

5. On the next page, select one of your domain's email addresses from the dropdown list, and then click the Proceed to Next Step button.

   Confirmation address

   This must be an email on your domain. Make sure one of the emails listed in that dropdown has been created on your domain and you are able to receive mail with it. If it does not exist, create this email first before continuing.

   Please note that the process to verify your domain using email is a last resort. This means you may never receive a confirmation email and the SSL will process correctly. However, it's possible you will receive an email if other DCV steps fail to verify. So it's still important to configure this email address. View the following article for further details:

   • What is the DCV process?
6. On the last page, choose how you'd like to pay. Your options are either credit card or electronic check.

   

7. When finished, click the Place Certificate Order button.

Email from DreamHost

You'll soon receive an email from support@dreamhost.com at the Domain Control Validation (DCV) address you selected for this order. This is just a confirmation of your purchase, but it may also ask you to click a link to verify your contact info.

Email from Sectigo

You may also receive a second email from Sectigo. This is part of the DCV process to verify your domain. This is the last option in the DCV process, so it's possible you never receive this email. If you do receive this email from Sectigo, proceed through the steps to complete the verification of your domain.

At this point, you have only purchased the Sectigo certificate. It is NOT installed yet. You can see on the Secure Certificates page that it's listed as 'Order Processing'.

When you click the Settings button to the right, you'll see a 'Temporary' certificate is currently installed, which can be viewed under the Current Certificate tab:

A temporary certificate is only active while your Sectigo certificate is in the process of installing. Once installed, your Sectigo certificate takes its place and becomes the only active certificate on your domain.

Once the Sectigo certificate is active, the following displays on the Secure Certificates page to the right of the domain.

The certificate is now installed on your domain. Visit the secure URL of your website at:

• https://example.com

You can see the browser bar shows a lock icon confirming the connection is secure.

Even after you have added the SSL certificate to your site, visitors will not be able to use it unless they manually type in https before your domain name. This defeats the purpose of adding it in the first place since the certificate is meant to protect all of your website traffic.

There are several ways to fix this. View the following article for instructions on how to create a configuration file to redirect all visitor traffic to the secure version of your URL (HTTPS):

• Force your site to redirect to HTTPS (SSL)

After installing your certificate, you may find that your browser is still showing an insecure warning when visiting the HTTPS version of your URL. There are a few reasons this could occur. Please view the following article for instructions on how to resolve this issue.

• Resolving insecure site and mixed-content warnings