Certificate hosting is an automated certificate lifecycle management service that helps reduce the burden of frequent certificate renewal tasks.
Why certificate hosting is needed
As industry security standards tighten, SSL certificate validity periods have been commonly shortened to one year or even less. This means you must frequently renew certificates manually. The process is cumbersome and certificates can easily expire due to oversight, causing service disruptions. Certificate hosting automates the entire certificate renewal and deployment process, eliminating the need for manual operations.
Service capabilities
The following table describes the capabilities of the certificate hosting service.
|
Feature |
Description |
Notes |
|
Certificate application |
Automatically submits a new certificate application before the current certificate expires. Trigger conditions:
|
The Individual Test Certificate (Free) cannot automatically apply for a new certificate through the hosting service. |
|
Certificate deployment |
Automatically deploys the new certificate to associated Alibaba Cloud services, such as Content Delivery Network (CDN), Web Application Firewall (WAF), and Server Load Balancer (SLB). |
Certificates cannot be automatically deployed to your web servers (for example, Nginx, Apache, or Tomcat running on Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances or on-premises servers). After a new certificate is issued, you must manually download and install it on these servers. |
|
Validity period management |
The system automatically bridges multiple certificates and dynamically adjusts the validity period when applying for a new certificate, ensuring that the total service duration is not affected. |
|
|
Technical support |
Provides one-on-one expert service with remote guidance to help you manually install the new certificate on your web server. |
Direct installation on behalf of you is not provided. |
Workflow
-
Monitor: The system continuously monitors the validity period of hosted certificates.
-
Trigger: The renewal process is automatically triggered at a specific time before the certificate expires (see the trigger conditions in the above).
-
Apply: The system submits a new certificate application to the certificate authority (CA) using the information from the original certificate.
-
Deploy: After the new certificate is issued, it is automatically deployed to associated Alibaba Cloud services.
-
Notify: You are notified of the issuance and deployment status of the new certificate by email or text message.
Prerequisites
To ensure that the hosting service successfully auto-renews your certificate, all of the following conditions must be met:
-
DNS hosting on Alibaba Cloud: The domain name associated with the certificate uses Alibaba Cloud DNS for domain name resolution (or the domain name has been authorized for automatic verification), and the domain name and certificate are under the same Alibaba Cloud account.
-
Domain name verified: The domain name has completed the initial verification. For subsequent automatic renewal applications, the system automatically adds DNS records to complete the verification.
-
Certificate information valid: The organization information and contact information registered with the certificate authority (CA) remain valid.
If the preceding conditions are not met, you must manually handle the certificate application and verification process.
Billing
Certificate hosting is a paid service. The fee is CNY 270 per renewal.
Certificates purchased when you enable certificate hosting in SSL Certificates Service (V1.0 no longer available for new purchases) do not support refund requests in the console. If you need a refund, . You can also contact a product technical expert for assistance. For more information, see One-on-one Expert Service..