What type of SSL certificate do I need?

[Hellraiser97 181]

I get the basic concept of the SSL, and now it seems the search engines are punishing sites without them.  I never worried about them before because we don't sell anything online or take any information outside of basic contact form stuff, but seems like now I need to.  So googled SSL and tried to read up on the various types and its fucking confusing.  So basically, here's what I got:

1) Shared hosting plan at HostGator. 

2) 1 primary domain that I don't do shit with and a couple subdomains that will be running wordpress sites and be used by addon domains. In case I didn't put that right, I have a bunch of setups like hr97.com/ousuxshit and another domain ousuxshit.com that runs off it.  On each of these is a basic contact form, one actually is a plug-in from a cloud service I use for project management.

Ideally, I'd like all the sites to have the little lock icon and such so people get that warm and fuzzy and fucking chrome stops saying 'Not secure'.  

Educate me please!

 

[smokebomb 357]

1. It looks like Hostgator provides free SSL certs but they expire every 90 days. This would be a pain in the ass for me but you may be ok with updating your certs every 3 months. They have info here https://support.hostgator.com/articles/ssl-certificates/hostgator-free-ssl and it looks like you can manage it with your cPanel. It also looks like they have a premium SSL certificate service which lets you buy certs with 1 & 2 year expirations. 

2. You mention that you have subdomains but use one example:  hr97.com/ousuxshit. As far as certificates are concerned, this is a single domain. SSL certs only care about the hr97.com part and not about anything after the /.  If this is the case, you would only need one SSL cert for hr97.com. If you have other domains or subdomains (like ousux.com or ousux.hr97.com), you will need a certificate for each website.

If you have more than 3 subdomains on a single domain (ousux.hr97.com, www.hr97.com), I would buy a wildcard SSL cert - which would look like *.hr97.com or *.ousux.com. This is the  easiest solution but they do charge more for wildcard certs. For instance, a single Gator SSL cert is $40/yr while a wildcard cert is $120/yr - https://support.hostgator.com/articles/domain-validated-ssl-certificates-for-single-domains.  

Note: www.hr97.com and hr97.com are different domain names and would need separate SSL certs if you didn't use a wildcard. 

Hostgator looks to have decent support for this and they would be able to set you up fairly easily. SSL certs are a common request and any hosting service has experience with them. 

Hopefully this helps,

[Hellraiser97 181]

Thanks smokebomb, that explains a lot.  One last question.  So a wildcard would cover ousux.hr97.com or hr97.com/ousux, but it would not cover ousux.com, where ousux.com is an addon domain?  (That's the right terminology, correct?  Where all the files for ousux.com are at hr97.com/ousux)

[smokebomb 357]

Correct - a wildcard for hr97.com would cover ousux.hr97.com, hr97.com/ousux, www.hr97.com and anything "*.hr97.com/*". 

And like you said, you would need another SSL cert for ousux.com, of which you could get a single cert or a wildcard cert. A single cert would cover anything for "ousux.com/*" but not for *.ousux.com. 

Add-on domain is the terminology that Hostgator would use while others would just simply call it another domain. 

[Hellraiser97 181]

Thanks! This is exactly the explanation I needed!

I do not like OU