So I was reading a wonderful book about SSL and TLS. It is really interesting. For a customer I requested my first SHA256 certificate back in december 2012. My first SHA256 certificate have been issued on february 2013. Now I wanted to request a SHA384 certificate which of course belongs to the SHA2 family. The thing is that I saw various CA changing their chain for SHA1 to SHA384 or from SHA256 tot SHA384. An example is Comodo (which is now in the process of reverting to SHA256). I created a CSR which had the algorithm sha384WithRSAEncryption. I have send the certificate to StartSSL an got back a SHA256 certificate. Now nothing  is wrong with that as probably most browsers do not even support SHA384 at the moment of writing. However I do wanted to spend some attention to this. To check what kind of algorithm your certificate have you can run the following code:

openssl x509 -in Certificatefile.cert  -text

To check what kind of algorithm your CSR has you can run the following code:

openssl req -in blabla.csr -text