If you are with security industry or e Commerce business you aware that SSL Certificate Reseller or provider only allow on domain to install ssl certificate. In the sense if you buy SSL Certificate for domain name xyz.com you can’t use it for abc.com domain name. Most of people have one domain name but what about that have more than one domain name. Like e commerce person have more than one domain for different types of business or have different domain and sub domain for different purpose. For that Wildcard Certificate helps to you.
When you think to buy ssl certificate for each domain name than problems come when you have to maintain all separately and renew and all other problems. But in Wildcard SSL Certificate you can install it on main server where your site is hosted. It is secure all your So, Wildcard SSL Certificate is Good news to secure unlimited subdomains as you want
What exactly is a Wildcard SSL?
We should first understand what wildcard means before going any further with wildcard certificates. 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. In other words, an asterisk symbolcould mean any other word. In our case, *.example dot com is used to represent all subdomains of example dot com: mail.example dot com, user.example dot com, news.example dot com, shop.example dot com etc.
The “Common Name” field in an SSL certificate indicates the domain in which the certificate will be used. Wildcard Certificates are basically certificates with wildcards in the Common Name, like *. bigbusiness dot com. If, in the future, you choose to get a wildcard certificate, you will be asked to supply the Common Name.
Benefits to Wildcard Certificates
The most obvious benefit to using wildcard certificates is to slash in costs. 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! Wildcard certificates cost about $600, and if you run a big website with ten subdomains, you will save about $900. The websites of big companies will sometimes need SSL on over 30 subdomains.
Wildcard Certificates are popular for another reason – manageability. It’s a daunting task to purchase, set up, and annually renew a dozen or so SSL certificates. It’s an especially daunting task to the person managing the SSL certificates and errors may easily abound. Fixing errors will cost you time, and with websites, downtime costs a lot of money. Compare all of that hassle to having to worry about just one wildcard certificate. Managing just one certificate is a much simpler task. Errors are easily minimized.
Wildcard Certificate Drawbacks
As you may expect, there are some drawbacks to using wildcard certificates. The first among them is security. Big websites are usually run by multiple servers, and by sharing one wildcard certificate, they share a single private decryption key. 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. You will be forced to put your website on down time until you get the wildcard certificate working again, or you get new SSL certificates for every single subdomain that needs SSL security.
Finally, you should know that you cannot get wildcard certificates with Extended Validation SSL (EV). What is EV in the first place? It’s a set of stringent rules that certificate providers use when approving applications for SSL certificates. EV SSL was meant to increase public confidence in SSL. The Common Name field is not allowed to have wildcards according to EV rules. Also note that you won’t get the green address bar feature with wildcard certificates, since it only works with EV Certificates.
Posts
