Custom certificates

Custom certificates are meant for Business and Enterprise customers who want to use their own SSL certificates.

Unlike Universal SSL or advanced certificates, Cloudflare does not manage issuance and renewal for custom certificates. When you use custom certificates, the following actions should be considered and accomplished by you:

• Upload the certificate.
• Update the certificate.
• Observe the certificate expiration date to avoid downtime.

Note

If your custom certificate does not cover all of your first-level hostnames, you can enable Universal SSL certificate to cover them.

If your custom certificate is from a certificate authority that Cloudflare partners with, consider switching to a Cloudflare-managed certificate to benefit from automatic issuance and renewal.

Certificate packs

Before deploying custom certificates to Cloudflare’s global network, Cloudflare automatically groups the certificates into certificate packs.

A certificate pack is a group of certificates that share the same set of hostnames — for example, example.com and *.example.com — but use different signature algorithms.

Each pack can include up to three certificates, one from each of the following signature algorithms:

• SHA-2/RSA
• SHA-2/ECDSA
• SHA-1/RSA

Each pack only counts as one SSL certificate against your custom certificate quota.

Note

You cannot delete the primary certificate if secondary certificates are present in the pack.

Availability

	Free	Pro	Business	Enterprise
Availability	No	No	Yes	Yes
Certificates included	0	0	1 (Modern) 1 (Legacy)	1 (Modern) (can purchase more) 1 (Legacy) (can purchase more)

Related features

Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs)

As part of the custom certificate process, you can leverage Cloudflare to generate your Certificate Signing Request (CSR). This additional option means that Cloudflare will safely generate and store the private key associated with the CSR.

Geo Key Manager (private key restriction)

By default, Cloudflare encrypts and securely distributes private keys to all Cloudflare data centers, where they can be used for local SSL/TLS termination. If you want to restrict where your private keys may be used, use Geo Key Manager.

Keyless SSL

If you want to upload a custom certificate but retain your private key on your own infrastructure, consider using Keyless SSL.