Just imagine paying for and managing four or more SSL certificates! The good news is that there is a solution - wildcard certificates. You can get SSL on as many subdomains as you want.

A Short Descrpition of Wildcards

You should first understand what the special little word in "wildcard certificate" means. A wildcard is usually represented by an asterisk (*). In computer terms, it's a symbol that stands for substitution by any other string or character. Very simply, an asterisk may mean any word. For example, we can represent all subdomains of bigbusiness dot com like shop.bigbusiness dot com, mail.bigbusiness dot com, news.bigbusiness dot com simply as *.bigbusiness dot com.

Common Name is the term used to refer to the domain name that will use the SSL certificate. Wildcard certificates are basically certificates with wildcards in the Common Name, like *. bigbusiness dot com. If you apply for a wildcard certificate sometime in the future, you will be asked to supply a Common Name, that's why it's important that you remember how to write wildcard domain names.

Benefits to Wildcard Certificates

Cutting cost is the main benefit to using wildcard certificates. Typical SSL certificates at $150 each may be fine for people who need SSL on only a few subdomains, but what about five subdomains? That's $750! On the other hand, $600 is the average prive for wildcard certificates. You can just imagine how much you're saving if you use more than five subdomains with SSL. Believe it or not, most big companies will need SSL security on up to 30 subdomains.

Manageability is another feature that people like in wildcard certificates. It's not easy to purchase, set up, and then renew annually a number of SSL certificates. It's not a good idea to let one person manage several SSL certificates because they may very easily make mistakes. Fixing those errors will cost you money. Compare that to having to worry about just one wildcard certificate. It's a simpler task to manage just a single certificate. It's easier to minimize errors.

Wildcard Certificate Drawbacks

As you may expect, there are some drawbacks to using wildcard certificates. The first thing that experts will point out is problems with security. Only one private decryption key is used by all the servers that use a single wildcard certificate. Several servers usually host multiple subdomains. Let's say that one of the servers is compromised and a hacker gains access to the decryption key. That hacker now has the ability to read all encrypted messages that are sent to and from the server.

Let's say the wildcard certificate is revoked. All subdomains that use the same certificate won't be able to properly function. Then you're basically shutting down your website until you either get the wildcard certificate working again, or you get certificates for every subdomain that needs SSL.

Lastly, wildcard certificates cannot be obtained with Extended Verification (EV). EV was basically invented to increase public confidence in SSL by enforcing more stringent guidelines to approving SSL applications. The Common Name field is not allowed to have wildcards according to EV rules. The green address bar feature only works in EV certificates, so you don't get that feature with wildcard certificates.

wildcard ssl certificate, wildcard ssl certificate, wildcard certificate