You can purchase a "wild card domain certificate", so it will cover *.whatever.com , these certificates are a couple of hundred dollars. The advantage is that there are no restrictions on the subdomains that it covers.
If you have a mess in the TLD, I recommend redirecting to a "secure" server for sessions. Remember that the whole session must be protected with ssl or it makes no sense. Your cookie value will be skipped and an attacker can authenticate without a username / password. This has become more detailed at the top of Owasp Top 10 2010 A3: Broken Authentication and Session Management.
Another option is that some certification authorities offer quantity discounts, but you will still be raped in terms of cost.
source share