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Salman A
Asked: 2018-09-28 00:49:49 +0800 CST

Add or do not add WWW hostnames to SAN certificate

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My setup is as follows:

  • 100+ websites
  • Each website has two host headers any.com and www.any.com
  • Requests for www.any.com are redirected to any.com without changing protocol
  • Some of these websites need SSL
  • Requests for http://sslonly.com are redirected to https://sslonly.com
  • I have a multiple domain (a.k.a. UCC/SAN) SSL certificate that allows up to 50 subject alternative names

My questions:

  1. What is the best way to set up subject alternative names on the SSL certificate? Do I need to add both sslonly.com and www.sslonly.com or just sslonly.com?

  2. What is the best way to set up the redirects?

I am using IIS 8.5

ssl

1 Answers

  1. Yes, you should add all names that are used for redirects. That is, if you connect to https://example.com and this site redirects to https://www.example.com and it is the same web site, then your certificate must include both, example.com and www.example.com in the Subject Alternative Names extension. If any redirect host part is not listed in the certificate, redirect will fail and stop at this point with certificate error in browser.

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