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by tialaramex 2535 days ago
Since we're talking about a Web Browser I'm going to assume we're talking about the Web PKI - certificates that are trusted in common software like web browsers that use TLS.

Leaf certificates in the Web PKI specify one or more SANs (Subject Alternative Names, the "alternative" is because this is the Internet's alternative to the way the X.500 directory system was designed, you don't use the X.500 directory system so you don't care about this) which can each be either an IP address (either IPv4 or IPv6) or it can be any Fully Qualified Domain Name (like bobs-laptop.example.com) from the Internet DNS or it can be a "Wildcard" like *.servers.example.com, which is considered a "match" for any Fully Qualified Domain Name that has exactly one label (a name with no dots in it) instead of the asterisk, so it would batch bigfiles.servers.example.com, and www.servers.example.com but not www.example.com or bigfiles.servers.microsoft.com)

You can get software (such as "Certbot" or "acme.sh") to help obtain trusted certificates periodically from the Internet automatically (at no cost) for a machine which has a Fully Qualified Domain Name on the Internet and is connected to the Internet at least sometimes. You may need to write software yourself to manage actually installing such certificates if your server software is custom - if you use common server software like Apache the tools can do it for you. The no cost option is provided by a charity, ISRG. If you're not a charity and appreciate the service you might consider sending a few bucks their way so they can keep doing this.

If your servers are not ordinarily connected to the Internet, but you do own an Internet domain name (e.g. example.com) you can just make up names for them in that domain and you will be able to obtain certificates for those made-up names, since you control the domain they're your names to do with as you please. But doing this is a bunch more work than the scenario where they're on the Internet.