hi all, I hope I've put this in the right forum, please feel free to move if not.

I am developing a site for a client and they want to be able to charge customers, so in order to do that they need to have an ssl cert for encrypting and securing the transactions of course. The problem is that they have their domain, and they have purchased 19 other domains (for a total of 20) that are all variations of spelling of the original domain as well as the .net .org .biz .name etc for each one.

only the .com is the actual site, and all the others are either aliases or will forward to the .com site. the question is, does the client have to purchase a certificate for each one of these domains? or do they have to purchase one of those UCC ssl certificates? is it installed on the hosting server, or at godaddy (for the non .com sites, since they are not actually hosted anywhere)?

I'd appreciate any advice and options here, because a single ssl can be had from 9-20 bucks, but according to godaddy, securing all 20 will cost around 250 bucks!

okay thanks!

It would be much easier if the parked Domain Names all pointed to the correct Domain Name
Then only one SSL certificate and setup is required

thank you for your reply, this is exactly what I was thinking, is this a viable soultion? so if I've got this correctly, they would type in say domainalternate.org and this would redirect them directly to domain.com where the ssl cert would be valid is that right? so that no matter what they put, they'll always be redirected to the .com and that way only one ssl is needed.

setting up parked domains would be done through the registrar (godaddy) right? will this affect their seo or the ssl or anything in any way?

many thanks!

If anything it could improve their SEO as they only want to promote one site and redirecting like that will indicate to search engines to only use the main domain and will also prevent any penalties for duplicate content.

If you're using multiple domains for one site always set up 301 redirects to the main domain.

awesome many thanks to you both for the advice. so I should then just purchase the regular ssl cert, have it installed on the server running the main .com site, and then set up 301 redirects for all the other domains. is that an option that can be set in godaddy?

If you are getting 1 certificate for 1 domain, I recommend getting RapidSSL from namecheap.com it is cheap and backed by GeoTrust.