Can I get a ssl certificate from godaddy.com for personal use?

Question

I want to get a certificate for my website and I want to be secure when I am on it. I will be the only one on it. Will godaddy.com give me a ssl certificate even though I have a dynamic IP address?

Answer 1

Godaddy or any other commercial provider will give you an SSL certificate for a domain if you can prove that you own it. It's cheapest to get it for a single host e.g. www.example.com or mail.example.org but you can get a wildcard that will work for *.example.com for more money.

You can also generate a self-signed certificate and use that for free. It's actually more secure for personal use than a commercial one since you have to accept it in your browser to stop the security alerts. A commercial one will work even if it's forged, e.g. issued by a CA other than the one you bought it from, unless you have certificate pinning. You want a commercial certificate if you want visitors to be secure and not get alerts popping up. For just yourself, it doesn't make any difference - you will be protected from packet sniffing on open wifi hotspots with any SSL certificate.

A browser will give a visitor a security warning if the common name of the certificate does not match the hostname of the website. If you have a certificate for www.example.com but connect to it as https://12.34.56.76, or as www2.example.com or www.example.net, it will give an alert. So you can use a dynamic DNS entry as long as the DNS gets updated.

Answer 2

A SSL certificate does not care if it's for your personal use or not. Use it whatever manner you wish. There are basically 2 types of SSL Certs with the easiest one to implement based largely on that you are the owner of the domain (verified via WhoIs) and that you have administrative rights, meaning you can ftp things to your web server.



The process to get a Standard SSL Certificate is relatively easy and cost about $49.00 a year.



You should be aware that the internet community is getting rid of SSL certs that use an intranet name of a private server, for example: "mail or server2.local", etc., or an IP address by itself.



To create a safer online environment, members of the Certificate Authorities Browser Forum met to define implementation guidelines for SSL certificates. As a result, effective October 1, 2016, Certification Authorities (CAs) must revoke SSL certificates that use intranet names or IP addresses.



Good Luck!

Answer 3

An SSL certificate is associated with your DNS domain. Therefore, if your server on your home IP connects to a DNS, then you will be able to add SSL. I do not believe it is possible to add it to a direct IP address, however.

Answer 4

You need SSL itself added to your website, this will give you a valid certificate in most cases.



You can use them for personal use, and the domain will be https:// and start with a padlock on the webpage indicating it is indeed secure.



You can use mod rewrite to push users to the secure ssl sections.