Recently I moved one of my client’s site from GoDaddy Shared Hosting to Knownhost VPS server. Since he was having one active SSL certificate on Godaddy then there was no need to purchase another on Knownhost because one can transfer SSL certificates from one server to another. For those who are new to SSL, here is the excerpt from Wikipedia about SSL,
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols that provide security for communications over networks such as the Internet.
If you are accepting payments thru credit card or processing some critical information about your visitors or users, you should have SSL certificate on your site so that the data will be processed in encrypted form. Yes, this is for security reasons. Anyway, here is the step by step guide to transfer SSL certificate from one server to another.
Step by Step Guide – SSL Transfer
- Go to the WHM of your new VPS account and under SSL/TLS, click on “Generate a SSL Certificate and Signing Request”
- Fill up the form with appropriate data and select Key Size as 2048
- Click on Create
- Now copy the Signing Request Key from the box. Keep rest two boxes as it is
- Go to your GoDaddy Account and select SSL Certificates option from the left panel
- It will list all the certificate you have on your account and the domain name associated with the same
- As you can’t download the certificate at this point of time and for that protection, download link has been deactivated
- Click on Re-Key after selecting the SSL certificate
- Paste the CSR which you had copied from your new VPS WHM
- Now click on “Confirm”
- Now you can see that the “Download” link is working fine and you can download the existing SSL certificate from GoDaddy account
- Download the zipped file of SSL certificate from GoDaddy
- Now go to your VPS account and send a request to customer support to install this SSL certificate. To do that, send them the zipped file and “SSL Private Key” with the request. You can find the “SSL Private Key” from one of the boxes out of 3 boxes generated at the time of CSR generation. You can check that in your email as well because WHM sends an email with those data.
- Done. Your previous SSL should install without any issue and you can now renew it from your new host
There are different procedures to generate CSR on different server type. As I have explained here the step to be followed on WHM. You can see the steps for different server type on this link.
Few days ago, I also shifted Internet Techies to VPS (Virtual Private Server) and still learning a lot from there. I will definitely share some learning from the migration, setup and optimization.