Overview

If you do not want to purchase an SSL certificate for your domain, but still wish to secure your site, you can create a self-signed certificate and install it on your web server. Although this will provide data encryption, your site visitors will see warning messages stating that your certificate is not issued by a recognized authority. For this reason using self-signed certificates is not recommended, as it will not instill confidence in customers, especially on e-commerce sites.

Instructions

1. Log into your Plesk Control Panel as the admin user and select Server and then Certificates:
2. Click Add New Certificate:
3. Specify the certificate properties and click on Self-Signed :
   • Certificate name. This will help you identify this certificate in the repository.
   • Encryption level. Choose the encryption level of your SSL certificate. We recommend choosing 2048 bit.
   • Specify your location and organization name. The values you enter should not exceed the length of 64 symbols.
   • Specify the domain name for which you wish to generate an SSL certificate. This should be a fully qualified domain name. Example: www.mt-example.com.
   • Enter the domain administrator's e-mail address.
4. Now your certificate will be generated and stored in the repository. Next you need to choose this new certificate to be used for your IP address. Select IP Addresses from the main Server menu:
5. Click the IP Address associated with your domain. In most cases it will not be the one in bold:
6. Select the self-signed SSL certificate from the Certificate drop-down box. Since this is a dedicated IP address for this domain Exclusive should be selected already. Select your new certificate from the drop-down box and select OK.
   
   

   NOTE:

   If there isn't a Certificate drop-down box, you are on a shared hosting IP address. You will need to add an IP address to your service. See here for details.

Resources

• Wikipedia
• Adding new IP addresses to a (dv)
• Plesk 8.6 Domain Administrator's Guide