As the self-signed certificates are created and meant to be just for the testing period , once the web site is globally active the certificate that is signed by the trusted CA authority is needed.

All the steps explained above for the self-signed certificate are the same just with one exception.

The created certificate which is created locally now has to be sent to the one of the CA trusted providers in order to be signed and ready for use within the web server.

There are many SSL packages offered from various CA providers so it's up to site's owner to decide which CA will be chosen.

The most often used certificate package offered is named RapidSSL and it offers 128bit SSL certificate signed by GeoTrust or VeriSign authority.

The package is only for the use with the apache web server with mod_ssl ssl service module enabled.

Differences between 128bit and 256bit encryption

As the SSL and it's security relies on the keys which are exchanged when the connection is negotiated, the higher the number of possibilities in which key can be generated the better security is achieved.

Mathematically speaking, 2n possible values exist for an n-bit key.