Wildcard EV-certificates: which options exist?

EV certificate - a great way to protect your website from theft of user data. Many online stores use these certificates to gain a high level of trust from their clients. After all, these certificates help to achieve a green line in the browser, which clearly indicates the highest level of security.

Today, many website owners are willing to buy a Wildcard EV certificate which protects an unlimited number of subdomains with a green line in the browser, but it is worth remembering that such SSL certificates do not exist. Let's look at the reasons why this happens, and what the alternatives are.

Why don’t Wildcard EV certificates exist?

EV certificates provide the highest level of trust among all types of SSL certificates. To prevent incorrect use of EV SSL certificates, SSL industry regulator, responsible for setting the rules for the SSL certificate issuance (known as the CA/B Forum), requires validation of each host associated with a certificate. For this reason buying a Wildcard EV-certificate is not possible because “wildcard” type of certificates, by definition, implies an unlimited number of subdomains contained by an asterisk (eg, * .domain.com) and are not listed explicitly.

In practice, for the protection of subdomains using EV certificate, you can do the following:

1. Buy several separate EV SSL-certificates. 

This option is ideal if you have only a couple of sub-domains that you want to protect. In this case you can issue single EV-certificates for each of them. The disadvantage of this option is that you will most likely (depending on where you make the order) enter the necessary data separately for each certificate. It is not always convenient for the users. You can order the EV certificate on the LeaderTelecom website.

2. Buy EV multi-domain certificate. 

This option is more convenient, because the multi-domain certificate covers a sufficiently large number of domains (including subdomains). It is very profitable to buy this when you have many domains/sub-domains that you want to protect with the certificate. The more domain names you add, the more efficient the multi-domain certificate becomes, compared with the standard EV certificate. In addition, the user can submit only one request for a certificate, containing all the domain names at once, and this is a good time-saver.

Additional domain names can be added to the certificate even after it has been issued. This is extremely convenient if one of your domain names is still unknown. You can order the EV multi-domain certificate on the LeaderTelecom website.

Another advantage of the multi-domain certificate before separate EV certificates is ease of administration. It is much easier to manage a single Multi-domain certificate than managing many individual certificates. Also, multi-domain certificates can save money (more sites, more savings). For these reasons website owners are increasingly looking to buying multi-domain EV certificates. You can always order an EV multi-domain certificate with a good discount on the LeaderTelecom site.