Binding Multiple Sites With Single SSL Certificate

One of our Premier customers called me the other day needing assistance on running multiple web sites with a single SSL certificate using the same port. The idea was clever, especially when you have many several sites but only a handful of SSL certificates. But how do you solve this one-Cert-fits-all issue?

There are two ways to solve this puzzle depending on you situation:
• Wildcard certificate : when sites belong to the same domain
• Unified Communications Certificate (UCC): when sites belong to different domains

Wildcard Certs are more common than UCC. Wildcard Certificates use Subject Alternative Names (SANs) to secure a domain and all of its first-level subdomains.

For my customer, he chose the Wildcard route. So, we asked his Certificate vendor to issue him a wildcard certificate with a friendly name that matches his domain suffix.

For example:
You have 2 sites: mystie1.mystie.com, mystie2.mysite.com
So ask your certificate vendor to issue a wildcard certificate with this friendly name: *.mysite.com

...And it solved the problem!