Wildcard and SAN Certificates! Which one should you opt for?

Absolute protection of a website is something which each and every webmaster wants for their website and they want it to be accomplished at the cheapest cost. Securing a website, these days, is one of the easiest thing to do because of the availability of infinite security solutions in the market but in order to avail most of them, one needs to pay a whopping cost. Want to protect your website by paying the minimum cost? Read on!

There are two types of certificates in the market you need to be familiar with in order to protect your website by spending the minimum amount of money: Wildcard Certificates and SAN Certificates. Both of these certificates are great and both of them offer a great value for money but both of them have their limitations too which you must make yourself aware of.

Wildcard certificates are perfect for you if and only if you want to protect unlimited subdomains with a single certificate. This example will make it easy for you to understand everything about Wildcard certificates: Suppose, your domain name is game.com and you have the following subdomains: cricket.game.com, hockey.game.com, golf.game.com, chess.game.com and tennis.game.com and you want to protect your domain as well as your subdomain, all you need is a single Wildcard certificate. A wildcard certificate can be expressed as: *.domain.com.

So, now that you know everything about Wildcard certificates, its time for you to familiarize yourself with SAN certificates. SAN stands for Subject Alternate Name and these certificates are perfect for you if and only if you want to protect multiple domain names with a single certificate. For Example: Suppose, you have the following domain names: game.com and game.net and game.org and you want to protect each one of them, all you need is a single SAN certificate.

While purchasing a SAN certificate, you need to mention the number of additional domains whereas and add them to the certificate in order to protect them whereas, you can protect unlimited subdomains without mentioning them at the time of carrying out the purchase of a Wildcard Certificate. So, I hope that now, you will easily be able to decide that which of these certificates is best for you.

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