Wildcard SSL Certificates

Wildcard SSL Buying Guide

If you use a lot of sub-domains on your website for various purposes, such as blog.domain.com, login.domain.com, archive.domain.com, and so on, a regular SSL certificate cannot protect all of your sub-domains. In fact, a regular SSL certificate can only protect your main domain name, without the ability for you to customize the protection much. Thus, if you want to protect all of your sub-domains, you need to use a different type of SSL certificate, which is called a wildcard SSL certificate. The wildcard SSL certificate allows you to protect your main domain, as well as all of the sub-domains that you have on your website.

Advantages

With the wildcard certificate, you get the secure seal from the certificate issuer, which helps to establish trust between your brand and your customers. You can even let your customers to verify your business information by clicking the secure seal. The certificate works on all of the available browsers and it is compatible with all devices. Moreover, the customers can see a trusted security sign in their browser address bar.

Wildcard Certificates Providers

There are a lot of wildcard certificate providers that you can find online. Each of them offers various benefits, advantages, and features that are not provided by their competitors. They also offer competitive pricing, with various validity options that you can choose upon ordering your first certificate. They often provide convenient security tools that you can use to ease your certificate management, as well as allows easy fix for future problems. How can you pick the right wildcard certificate providers for your business? Here are some tips that you can follow.

Unlimited Server Licenses

It is important to choose a wildcard certificate provider that offers unlimited server licenses for two reasons: security and convenience. There are certificate providers that don’t allow you to install your certificate on multiple servers simultaneously. Yes, you can install your certificate on another server, but you have to remove the certificate from your current server if you want to do that. This is not a good thing because if you are using multiple sub-domains on multiple servers, you cannot protect all of your sub-domains due to them being hosted on different physical servers. So, you have to pick the wildcard certificate provider that offers unlimited server licenses.

Additional Security Features

It’s not enough for you to just install a wildcard certificate on your website. You also need to back it up with various additional security tools to ensure the maximum safety of your website. Most wildcard SSL providers don’t provide these additional tools, but a good SSL provider gives you various additional tools to enhance their SSL protection. Such tools include daily malware scanning, blacklist prevention, fraud protection, and so on. It is preferable for you to choose a wildcard SSL provider that offers these features to minimize any potential security problems in the future. Yes, you might need to pay more for your certificates, but this is a good investment for your website.

Strong Encryption System and Full Validation

When we are talking about SSL certificates, we are talking about encryption system. The best wildcard certificate that you have should be the one with the strongest available encryption system. If possible, you have to pick the one that offers at least two types of encryption algorithms. It provides the best security and protection for your website, especially in your business transactions. Also, the certificate should offer full organization validation that ensures each wildcard certificate is issued only to a legitimate business that has successfully validated their business information and domain name ownership.

Conclusion

Installing an SSL wildcard certificate is the best way for you to save your investment on the protection for your website. It allows you to install the certificate in the main domain and all the related sub-domains, so that you can protect all of your online assets in a single certificate. There are three tips you can follow to pick the best wildcard certificate provider for your business. First, it should allow you to install the certificate on unlimited servers. Second, it should provide additional security features to maximize your website protection. And third, it should provide the best security encryption system that supports at least two encryption algorithms.