title: PayPal Changes for SHA-256 Certificates
body: <p>I've been getting emails from PayPal about the changes they're making about supporting SHA-256 certificates and warning me that I may have to update things on my website.</p>
  
  <p>I use PayPal's IPN service, which I originally set up on my website (all custom PHP code that I wrote, no pre-built shopping carts) and that has been running quite happily since 2008.</p>
  
  <p>My hosting is shared hosting as it's not a very large or busy website. The hosting platform us running PHP 5.2.17, Apache 2.2.3 (CentOS), and OpenSSL 0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 01 Jul 2008 (I got all of this info from PHP's phpinfo() function).</p>
  
  <p>Am I correct in thinking that any changes that need to be made will have to be made by my web host since I can't update any software on the server?</p>
  
  <p>When I originally set everything up back in 2008 I remember downloading a certificate from PayPal and using OpenSSL on my Windows PC to create something (another certificate? I don't know) which I then uploaded to my website and use for encrypting my payment requests to PayPal. Does the SHA-256 changes that PayPal are bring in affect this?  Do I need to remake the certificate or something?</p>
  
  <p>I did try using the IPN Simulator (after changing the end points that my IPN handler uses) but I can't get this to work as the IPN Simulator gives me a 502 Bad Gateway error and I've got no idea what that means or what the problem might be.</p>