The certificates in the In Progress tab appear listed by the common name, which is the fully qualified domain name for which you plan to use your certificate. In many cases, this is the domain you want customers to connect to using SSL/TLS. You can also view the slot number of the certificate, which is an internal ​Akamai​ reference number.

View certificate types

You can view your certificate type in the Certificate Type column. Your certificate type is made up of the type of validation you want to use for the certificate and number of domains that certificate can support.

A certificate authority (CA) is a trusted entity that signs certificates and can vouch for the identity of a website. A CA issues a certificate after it verifies your identity. For more information, see Certificate authority.

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CPS-supported CAs

CAs supported by CPS include DigiCert, and Let's Encrypt. If you want to use a different CA, you must use a third-party certificate and CA.

When a CA gets a request for a certificate and verifies your identity, it validates the certificate. To learn more about the validation types, see Select a validation type.

Your certificate type also determines how many domains the certificate can support. CPS supports the following types of certificates:

• Single certificate. Associates a property hostname with a single name.

• Wildcard certificate. Secures an entire property hostname. A certificate for *.example.com secures www.example.com, mail.example.com, and any subdomain of example.com. If you do not know what property hostnames you want to attach your certificate to, you should obtain a wildcard certificate.

• SAN certificate. Uses Subject Alternative Names (SANs) and allows you secure up to 100 property hostnames with one certificate. These certificates are for users of many platforms who need to secure multiple names across different domains. You can update a SAN certificate at any time to add or remove names.

• Wildcard SAN certificate. Uses wildcard certificates with Subject Alternative Names. You can secure up to 100 property hostnames with one certificate, and 25 of those property hostnames can be wildcards.

• Third-party certificate. Uses a signed certificate obtained by you from an external CA. Third-party certificates in CPS support up to 100 hostnames, any of which can be wildcards.

View certificate status

When you open the In Progress tab, you can quickly view the status of your certificates at any of the following stages of progress in the life cycle of the certificate:

• Submitting to CA. This column indicates whether or not you submitted the certificate to the CA. If you choose to use domain validation, this column may also indicate you created a certificate and submitted it to Let's Encrypt. After CPS receives a challenge from Let's Encrypt, you can check your validation status by selecting Domain Validation Statuses in the menu in the Actions column.

• Receiving certificate. This column indicates whether or not CPS received the validated certificate back from the CA.

• Deploying to Staging. If you use the staging network to test your certificate before deployment, this column indicates whether or not the certificate is currently on the staging network.

• Deploying to Production. This column indicates whether or not your certificate is currently active on the production network.

The following icons can appear in these columns to indicate the status at each stage of the certificate life cycle:

• The circle with the slash through indicates the stage is not applicable to this certificate.

• The circle with a horizontal line through indicates the stage is not started.

• The check indicates the stage is complete.

• The timer indicates the stage is in progress. For example, the network is updating with your changes, or the system is preparing your certificate request.

• The pencil indicates that you must take action at this stage. For example, the system is waiting for you to upload your third-party certificate, or the system is waiting to begin processing your certificate request. If you see this icon with the words To-Do under it, you can click on To-Do and view a message telling you the action you must take to move the certificate to a new stage.