If you're contacting DigiCert's customer service for support, there's a chance that your day is already not going how you planned. And while we pride ourselves on our 5-star customer support and amazing support representatives, we know that you want to get your problem solved as quickly as possible.

Get Back to What You Were Doing Faster

Here are four ways you can help your support representative pinpoint your problem faster and get you back to what you were doing.

1. Come prepared

Before you contact customer support, gather some information. Below are good things to have on hand:

• Admin credentials, or the proper permissions to administer the account
• Order and/or account number
• Name(s) on your certificate (e.g., mail.domain.com, www.mydomain.com)
• Physical or remote access to the server in question

Having this information will be very helpful in solving your problem. Of course, your reason for contacting support may be that you need this information—and that’s OK. But if you have it, it's best to collect this information before you contact support.

2. Be specific with your question/concern

The more specific you can be about the issue the better. If you have errors with your certificate and your server happens to be behind a firewall or load balancer, letting us know those details up front will be very helpful. If you have an error, copy and paste the exact error message or take a screenshot rather than trying to explain what wasn't working.

3. Tell the truth (don't worry, we won't judge)

We just want to help you find a solution. If you made changes to your server configuration (even ones you'd rather not admit to) or something relevant like that, go ahead and tell us. It can avoid wasting a lot of time looking in the wrong places.

4. Answer all of our questions (even the silly ones)

Your tech support engineer will most likely ask all kinds of questions that may seem obvious or irrelevant to you. We ask these questions to help rule things out, to narrow down the problem, and to give you the quickest solution possible. If you are asked for your order number, or what domain name the certificate in question is for, it’s not because we want to test your knowledge of your account details. There are underlying reasons for our questions, and our goal is to efficiently solve your problem so you can go back to doing what you do.

Bonus Section: Common SSL Support Issues

Here are some of the most common SSL support issues that we see.

Don’t see your question on this list? Feel free to visit the comprehensive support section of our website. It contains hundreds of support articles on many SSL topics.

My account is locked out/I forgot my password.

Double-check that you actually forgot your password, and not your username. Sometimes when people get locked out of their account it is because they were using the wrong username, not password. You can click the Forgot Username? link to make sure you’re using the right username before you try to reset your password.

When and how do I create a CSR?

You need to create a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) before ordering or renewing a certificate. Guides for creating CSRs on top servers and platforms can be found at https://www.digicert.com/csr-creation.htm.

Do I have a SHA-2 certificate?

Now that Google is phasing out trust for SHA-1 certificates in November 2014, many people want to know if their certificate is SHA-1 or SHA-2. You can use an online tool such as the DigiCert SHA-1 Sunset Tool to find any SHA-1 certificates in your environment. You can also check a specific certificate using our SSL Installation Diagnostics Tool.

I didn’t receive my private key with my certificate. Where is my private key?

When you create the CSR you are really creating two things: the CSR and the private key. The private key is on the server where the CSR for your certificate was created.

Where is my public key?

The certificate you receive from the CA is also known as the public key. Its name is often based on your domain, such as my_domain_com.crt.

Contacting DigiCert Support

Now that you have some tips on how to get the most of DigiCert's customer support, feel free to contact us if you ever have a problem! We are available 24/7 by phone, email, and live chat.