Hi James, thanks for responding. Problem has been solved after 3 installation trials with 3 different SSL certificates. I installed the csr & key files into the etc/apache2/ssl folder according to my host's instructions but I had to move them to var/www/tci/ssl because that was where previous ssl files were located. To move the files, I temporarily changed the permissions to 777 & after moving I changed it back to 400. I then deleted this SSL folder. The move may have corrupted the key file, but I examined the key file before and after the move & it was identical. Does the order of placement of the cert files into the SSL folder matter, because I had already placed the .crt & gd-bundle.crt files in the var/www/tci/ssl folder before I moved the csr & key files to this folder? I read cPanel instructions (but I did not use a cPanel to install the SSL) that said that removing a key will remove the csr & crt, but the csr & crt files were visible in this folder after moving the key. The person who helped me with this said that my host's instructions for 2048 key generation could have been the problem and they regenerated the csr/key using their own code, which is when it worked.