What are the different types of SSL certificates?

SSL Certificates ensure that your visitors’ personal information remains private when visiting your site. SSL Certificates are used to secure websites by encrypting data between users and web servers. Learn what makes an SSL Certificate different from other security measures!

What is SSL?

SSL is short for Secure Sockets Layer. SSL works with HTTPS encryption of a website. Generally, websites that do not have SSL certificate or are not protected by HTTPS are very risky to make any kind of online purchase or exchange of information.

Because the information on these websites is not encrypted, there is a high risk of hacking and stealing information at any time. HTTPS creates an encrypted connection between the user’s browser and the web server they are communicating with and protects communications from external interruptions.

This encrypted connection requires an SSL certificate.

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◈ Single Domain SSL Certificates

A Single-domain SSL Certificate only applies to one domain. And it cannot be used in any other domain, not even in the subdomain of the domain for which you have activated this Single-domain SSL.

But all pages in the same domain are protected with SSL. For example, suppose you have a domain name www.techpoth.com– and it has Single-domain SSL Certificate on.

Then www.tech-tune.com/tag/ssl – this link will also be protected in SSL because it is under the same domain. But if we change a little bit to see tag.tech-tune.com – let’s say it will be SSL?

In a word, the answer will not be, because it is a subdomain link, it will not be applicable for this.

◈ Multi-Domain SSL Certificates (MDC)

Multi-Domain SSL Certificate refers to the validation of more than one domain, a Multi-Domain Certificate can protect multiple domains.

Suppose you have 5 websites, and one has no links to the other.

In that case, you can buy a multi-domain SSL certificate for 5 websites or 5 separate certificates for 5 websites.

This certificate does not apply to any website subdomain.

◈ Wildcard SSL Certificates

The Wildcard SSL certificate is for a single domain and all its subdomains. A subdomain lies under the umbrella of the main domain.

The subdomain usually has an address that starts with something other than ‘www’.

For example, www.kaj24.com has several subdomains, including cp.kaj24.com, blog.kaj24.com etc. A subdomain under each major kaj24.com domain. So, this called Wildcard certificate.