What's the difference between the Personal and Web Hosting certificate store?

windows iis ssl-certificate windows-server certificate-store
Sam Rueby picture Sam Rueby · Oct 31, 2014 · Viewed 57.2k times · Source

enter image description here

In Internet Information Services Manager, you're given the option between the Personal and the Web Hosting certificate store when creating or importing a certificate.

What's the difference?

Answer

Crypt32 picture Crypt32 · Oct 31, 2014

from IIS.NET:

The key difference between Web Hosting store and Personal store is that Web Hosting store is designed to scale to higher numbers of certificates.

For lightweight scenarios (when you have less than 20-30 certificates) you can use any, Personal or WebHosting store.

When you have 30+ different certificates, you should use Web Hosting store for performance reasons.

Related questions

How to create .pfx file from certificate and private key?

I need .pfx file to install https on website on IIS. I have two separate files: certificate (.cer or pem) and private key (.crt) but IIS accepts only .pfx files. I obviously installed certificate and it is available in certificate …

Read More
IIS6: Create/install SSL self-signed cert from command line

I want to automate the setup of SSL for a website in IIS6. It appears selfSSL and certutil can be used to do this but certificates are new to me and I'm unsure how to put them together. From what …

Read More
IIS Manager in Windows 10

How do you open IIS (Internet Information Services) Manager using Windows 10? I have installed the developer preview of Windows 10 and can't seem to find IIS Manager? It is not in Control Panel > Administrative Tools. When I browse to the …

Read More