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Is a certificate tied to an IP address, domain name or a specific machine?

April 26, 2017Certificate domain name ip address Machine tied

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Is a certificate tied to an IP address, domain name or a specific machine?

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The domain name is the only part of the certificate that is authenticated for an SSL session by the client, so it is the most important. Certificates are tied to the domain names they display, and free of any IP address constraints. For example, if you have a certificate for ‘www.foo.com’, as long as it is installed on the matching domain ‘www.foo.com’ it does not matter which IP address it is referenced to, it will work fine. When using more than one secure virtual host, you must assign a unique IP address to each one. SSL does not support name based virtual hosting. You are still free to change the assigned IP address, as long as the new IP address points to the same domain name as your certificate. When using Load Balancing with separate machines, if the domain used to access each machine is identical, they can all be secured with a single certificate.