i have a client that posed the following group of questions. anyone qualified to answer these? i'm more of a web designer, so i'm not really qualified to answer these. any help would be more than appreciated. we are transferring his host provider.

is the transfer and installation of our certificate a simple
matter or something that could take days? Can we test the SSL
funtionality before we shutdown our previous site? Does (previous company)
have to physically give you something before our certificate is
enabled on the new server? What exactly is involved?

 

anybody?

 

I haven't done it myself, but I think it's the hard part of all the choices. It's not super fast, it's a pain in the butt, etc etc. It depends on your cert company if you can pay a fee to move the cert. Often, it's easier to just get a new one if you are making a big change between machines. It's not like DNS because their is an external audit involved to ensure that the company ordering the cert is who they say they are. I'm pretty sure when we moved hosting facilities we had to have all 12 of our secure certs reprocessed with Geotrust since the certs are IP-based.

PM me if you need more specific answers and I can FW them to my sysadmin.

 

Certs are not IP based.

Yes, each individual cert needs an individual IP -- but they're not tied to them.

In order for a smooth transition, you just need to ensure that your new hosting platform is the same as the old hosting platform. For example, if the old host used Apache + ModSSL, the new host needs to be Apache + ModSSL.

Assuming that IS indeed the case, you simply need to get the cert file and the key file from the old host. YOU MUST HAVE BOTH. If you cannot get the key files, your cert files will not work, and you must generate a new CSR and purchase new certificates.

 

i appreciate the info!