SSD Nodes: 1 Click-Applications’ Primer Document

If you’re reading this article, there’s a big chance you’ve chosen one of our 1 Click Applications (aka 1CA), having your preferred application ready to be used as soon as your server is up and running. Our tech engineers at SSD Nodes strived to save you time and effort, preparing the most demanded applications, while making sure you get the most updated version of your preferred app, after having been fully tested and deployed to fit your basic needs. And to make them even more secure, all our 1CAs are installed with an active HTTPS self-signed certificate that will secure your website and protect your customers’ online transactions, making sure their sensitive information, such as their credit card number and personal information are being securely transmitted.

In this article

• Understanding our 1CAs built-in Self-Signed Certificates
• Transforming your Self-Signed to a CA certificate
• Adding a hostname to your server? (Changing IP to hostname)

In case you landed on this article, and you didn’t purchase your server yet, along with your preferred 1CA installed, just visit our site, choose the server’s specifications that fit your needs, along with any of the 1 Click- Applications we offer (WordPress, Zabbix, phpMyAdmin, Webmin, Nextcloud, LAMP, LEMP, Grafana, MongoDB to name a few), complete your checkout, and in a couple of minutes, our building algorithms will make it ready to use!

Understanding built-in Self-Signed Certificates

Please check our article that explains how our built-in self-signed certificates create safer experiences for your customers, build more trust and improve conversions, protecting both customers and internal data.   Moreover, we explain pros and cons of self-signed vs CA certificates; the latter are created, signed, and issued by a third party called a certificate authority (CA). Check more details in our blog article: What are SSL Server Certificates and how do they protect my website?

Trying out your certificate

• Load your site in a browser by prefixing https:// to your website address. You would get a notification message, which is normal for a self-signed certificate.
• The browser is just warning you that it can’t verify the identity of the server, since the certificate is not signed by any of its known certificate authorities.
• Click “ Advanced” or “More information” depending on the browser, and choose to proceed. Below is an example from Google Chrome.

After you do so, your browser will load your application’s welcome page, but with a noticeable symbol in front of your URL (aka website address). In the above pop-up, click on “Certificate is not valid” for more details on the self-signed certificate.

Transforming your Self-Signed to a CA certificate

CA certificates can either be procured from Let's Encrypt or from other CA authorities. Please check our special article discussing differences between Let's Encrypt & other CA-issued certificates, along with the essential information on how to procure both of these types. After you procure your certificate (let’s encrypt or other), please refer to the below, which describes installing the CA certificate on your web server

APACHE WEB SERVER

• Edit apache’s default configuration file

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