What is the difference between a shared SSL certificate and a dedicated certificate?
A shared certificate is issued to Sectorlink for the server that your website resides on. The shared SSL certificate will have Sectorlink’s domain name in the URL. An example would be https://secure1234.sectorlink.com/yourdomain. A dedicated certificate is issued to you owning the domain. The web certificate has your domain name and looks like https://www.yourdomain.com. All you are doing is changing the http:// to https://.
Both certificates are issued for a specific domain, and their installation procedures on the Web servers are identical. However, the shared certificate is always issued to the Web host’s domain, but the dedicated certificate is issued to the customer owning the domain. When each new domain is added to a Web server in a shared environment, VeriSign first authenticates the individual business owning the domain name. Upon approval, VeriSign issues the Secure Site Seal to the individual domain. Lastly, VeriSign links the certificate of the Web host’s server to the individual domain by “mapping” the domain to the Web host’s shared certificate in our database. (It is important that a Web host follow the VeriSign fulfillment process to make sure that the certificate and Secure Site Seal are linked so that they operate correctly). By linking the Secure Site Seal and the Web host’s certificate, VeriSign can verify that the individual domain is a “VeriSign Secure Site.
