Hello,

New here and not sure if I am posting this to the right room. Please let me know if there is a better room to post this to.

Here is what I do...

I own multiple niche ecommerce sites and I am always testing and adding new sites.


Here is my "problem"...

I use OScommerce for my ecommerce sites. When I have an idea for a new site, I need to buy and SSL cert for it once I go live and start advetising it. Problem is, if the site tanks, I have wasted money on the SSL cert. This gets pretty expensive, not to mention I am spending money on advertising.

Here is what I want to do...

I have multiple sites, but I operate under one business name. To keep it simple, let's say that my company name is ABC Company.
What I want to do is basically buy one SSL cert and kind of create my own shared SSL that I can use for all my sites and mainly for the test sites so that I do not waste money on a new SSL cert befoer I know if the site will generate anough profit to keep it going.

So my thought was to buy a domain like "secureABCcompany.com", buy an SSL cert for it, and use it as basically a shared cert for all my sites. So if I have 5 sites..

111.com
222.com
333.com
444.com and
555.com

all would use the same cert from secureABCcompany.com. So the first site would use secureABCcompany.com/111, the second secureABCcompany.com/222, and so on. Sure, I could have every site as a subdomain of secureABCcompany.com (like 111.secureABCcompany.com or 222.secureABCcompany.com, but then that would require me to buy a wildcard SSL cert, which is more expensive.

CONFUSING, I hope not, I really need help here. :D

My questions are...

1. Can I acheive this by using a multi-domain host or do I need to use a reseller hosting package to achieve this?

2. Can you think of a better solution?

By the way, I already understand that I can just go with a multidomain host that offers shared SSL, but I do not want to use someone elses shared SSL because of many reasons. 1st being, I hear that it can be really slow if there are many folks using it and #2, I really don't like the thought of using someones elses shared SSL because it may seem shady to my customer. For instance, I know of one multi-domain host that offers shared SSL and their secure server site is "www.mysecurehostingsite.com". I think that looks bad and possibly may look bad to my customers as well. Your thoughts on this would be good as well.

Anyhow, sorry for the confusing post. I could not think of a better way to ask my question.

I hope I can get some good feedback, suggests, etc here on this matter and remember, the key here is to save money.

Thanks in advance. :)

It's possible to do.

What you would end up would be:

https://www.yoursecuredomain.com/~username

You would only need to buy 1 SSL for the URL. If you don't own the server, you should ask your host if they can set it up for you.

Thnks.

I understand. That is what I was guessing in my post, but I guess the question is, can I do this with a multi-domain hosting account or would I have to do this on a reseller account? No difference to me either way (of course the latter is a bit more expensive). I currently have a multidomain account but I will switch to reseller account if I have to.

If you did this in one multi-domain account....for example's sake we'll say it's cpanel...

then your main domain secure site would be

securesite.com/~username/

Then the next secured website you construct would be
securesite.com/~username/222

and the third
securesite.com/~username/333

and you get the idea....If that's acceptable to you - then yes it can be done using a single account. Though if you'd rather have
securesite.com/~111username/
and
securesite.com/~222username/
and so on - you would want a seperate account for each website.