We are into SSL installation service for many years and I am here trying to explain an incident which gives an insight on the use of UCC certificates.Since one of our admin suggested to purchase wild card SSL certificate when a customer reported issues with SSL installation on www.domain.com when he actually purchased domain.com ‘s SSL certificate. And the issue was escalated when the admin couldn’t get it working and customer of our client started threatening to cancel.
“domain.com” is a subdomain of “.com“, so the wildcard that would work for it would be “*.com”. This is why a cert for *.domain.com works for “www.domain.com” but not, “www.sub.domain.com” or “domain.com”.
Solution which should have been suggested was UCC certificates and not Wildcard SSL certificates. From GoDaddy’s KnowledgeBase at http://help.godaddy.com/article/3908 here is the definition for UCC or Multi domain certificates.
Unified Communications Certificates (UCC) are SSL Certificates that secure multiple domains and multiple hostnames within a domain. They allow you to secure up to 100 domain names in a single certificate and can consolidate all your secure domains into one certificate.
I believe UCC works based on subjectAltName directive of openSSL, which you can read more about at http://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/x509v3_config.html#Subject_Alternative_Name_
Up to 5 domains, it will cost $90 and with GoDaddy’s coupon codes you may be able to get it with 10 to 20% discounts ð We are no way affiliated to GoDaddy or NoDaddy. But not sure of other providers who gives UCCs at a lower rate. If you are aware of one, please feel free to comment!
However we had to make it work for the customer and we did it. Since it was a cPanel server having EasyApache 3, our SSL installation service team had to do custom modification for the virtualhosts inorder to make sure that it worked even after the changes are made. How to do that will be in one of the next posts, soon.
