SSL security is configured using standard directives in Apache configuration file.
Important: The mod_ssl package must be installed on the Billing Application server to use the SSL secured connection for your site.
The SSL certificate is loaded by means of SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile directives.
For more details, refer to Apache documentation, for example, here.
Chain SSL Certificate
If your SSL certificate is issued by Certification Authority that is not included in the list of web browser trusted authorities, your customers when first time opening your store or their control panel pages are shown an alarming warning saying that your site SSL certificate is unknown (for their browsers) and asking whether to trust your certificate or not.
However, your certificate is absolutely reliable and issued by one of the authorized SSL providers. In this case, the undesirable warning can be suppressed my means of chain certificate.
A certificate chain is a sequence of certificates, where each certificate in the chain is signed by the subsequent certificate. The purpose of certificate chain is to establish a chain of trust from a peer certificate to a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) certificate. The CA vouches for the identity in the peer certificate by signing it.
The chain SSL certificate is configured with the SSLCertificateChainFile directive.
For more details, refer to Apache documentation, for example, here.
Wildcard SSL Certificate
Wildcard SSL certificates secure multiple subdomains with a single SSL certificate, reducing management time and cost. Using the wildcard notation (*.provider.com) allows you to extend security to all servers in your infrastructure.
Note: Wildcard SSL certificates do not protect multi-level domains. For example, a wildcard SSL certificate for *.provider.com will protect eu.provider.com, but will not protect fr.eu.provider.com.
For more details, refer to Apache documentation, for example, here.