SSL - Need solution for consolidating

[fumbler]

My company is looking for a solution to consolidate our SSL certificates in an effort to reduce maintenance efforts and associated costs. We currently host and support approximately 55+ web applications and several of them require SSL certificates. Issuing our own SSL certificates is not an option (they used to do this but our clients were resistant in using the site not seeing a certificate "brand" they recognized).

Wondering if anyone can offer any solutions (or a company that could provide a certificate that does) as to how we can reduce this down to one certificate. Do any type of global server certificates exist? My understanding is that SSL is based on an IP/domain name and won't work outside of this.

Outside of us issuing our own certificates, the only solution I can come up with is to point this all to a sub-domain that has the SSL certificate but this isn't an optimal solution for us.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[Corey Bryant]

Have you looked at the wildcard SSL option? It would still be issued to one domain name (*.example.com) but then you could potentially have all the sub-domains needed

-Corey

[fumbler]

I have only just heard about the wildcard option today.

problem is that it's multiple domain names requiring this:

example1.com, example2.com, example3.com, etc...

[wheel]

I think you're going to be stuck buying them from somewhere 'trusted'. About all you can do is find someplace inexpensive.