I've searched the forums, but I haven't really found anything which completely answers my question so I was hoping someone on here might be of help.

I've been hosting for a few years, but I'm fairly new to SSL. One of my customers would like to setup an SSL certificate so that they can setup a secure shopping cart on their website. What I would like to see in a how to is a guide from beginning (what kind of certificate they should purchase, how to setup their domain) to end.

Based on what I have read I have put the customer's account on a separate IP. The customer has purchased a RapidSSL for accountsdomain.com from registerfly and forwarded me the cert. They were able to install the cert themselves within cpanel, but when you went to https://accountsdomain.com you would just receive a message saying the "The connection was interrupted". If I remove the certificate from within cpanel and I try to install it from WHM I do not have sufficient information to install (The email only contains the CRT and not the key).

Questions:
1. What am I doing wrong?
2. Should a subdomain be setup just for the secure portion of the website? Like https://secure.accountsdomain.com (What is common practice here?)
3. If yes to 2 then does the customer need to purchase a new cert? Or change the existing one?
4. What is the proper method for purchasing/installing a cert?

Thanks in advance everyone.
Happy Holidays!!

well the easiest way to do things is this, don't use the installer under cpanel, do it via WHM.

Just put in the domain the cert is for and hit tab or something and it will auto populate the username/ip field.

Have him send you the key that he was emailed when he generated the CSR, then just place the contents of the key in the middle large box for private key, and the cert the provider sent him in the top big box and click Do it.

Fairly simple.

Turns out I didn't have the key which the customer used to generate the cert. Once I had that everything worked! Thanks!!

good deal, glad you got it working