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Firstly forgive me for my lack of knowledge on this subject.

The scenario is that I have a domain example.com. This domain is hosted on for example and is the main domain for a company website.

I wish to also have a customer portal but intend to host this on another server that I have more control of. The subdomain will be customer.example.com and will be hosted on

The servers are in different locations, but can communicate with each other over the WAN.

I need to get an SSL certificate that will cover both the domain and subdomain and as I understand this I require a wildcard SSL.

My question is whether it is possible to purchase a wildcard SSL that can be used over multiple servers. I have tried to look for some info on this, however, most of my searches return information about multiple SSL certificates on one server. If anyone can give me some advice or point me towards some guides/documentation, it would be much appreciated.

Note I use linux based servers with apache.

I do not need a product/service recommendation as I have a provider in mind and understand that this is not the purpose of SE sites.

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closed as off-topic by MichelZ, MadHatter, TomTom, Ward, mdpc Jul 22 at 17:26



Yes, this is possible. However, we do not do service or product recommendations on ServerFault (see help). –  MichelZ Jul 17 at 7:52
@MichelZ I understand you do not recommend products/services. I already have a provider in mind, I just need help finding the information to guide me on the process and of course clarification that it is possible, which you have obviously done. Many thanks for your response. –  The Humble Rat Jul 17 at 7:57

2 Answers 2

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Yes you can buy a wildcard SSL and use that over multiple servers. There is no technical reason not to, although certain vendors will try prevent you from a marketing perspective.

Using the same certificate in multiple servers means you'll have to copy the private key as well which in some key stores is not as trivial as it sounds. In apache and mod_ssl you simply copy the private_key PEM file, but Java keystores...

But two individual SSL certificates, one for example.com (and it is fairly common nowadays that that will also be valid forwww.example.com) and a second for subdomain.example.com are likely much cheaper and easier to maintain than getting a wildcard certificate.

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java keystores are my nemesis. –  EEAA Jul 17 at 13:49

Yes: you can use a certificate (whether wildcard or not) on any number of servers, as long as it's valid the domains that the servers are serving.

You're correct in that you want a certificate for *.example.com. Remember to copy both the public key and the certificate to every server you're using to serve content for example.com subdomains.

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Also remember to check with your CA if your're allowed to use it on multiple servers. –  MichelZ Jul 17 at 7:58
