Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which lets you include text from a specific source within a website. In the most widespread scenario, the text from a single file is incorporated in another, giving a site the sense that it's dynamic. For instance, if your site includes ten web pages, five of them can easily contain the content of some file, such as horoscope.txt. In case you modify this text file, the new content is going to appear on all of the five webpages, which shall let you update your website much easier than if you had to update an element of all 5 web pages. Server Side Includes is occasionally employed to include the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's displayed on the website, the present time and date or the customer's IP address. Every webpage that works by using SSI should have a particular extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting

As our custom made cloud hosting platform offers Server Side Includes on a global level, you'll be able to implement this function with the shared hosting packages that we have and add dynamic content to your sites with a couple of clicks. SSI is activated for every individual domain or subdomain by placing an .htaccess file in the site folder with only a few lines of code. Certainly, you do not have to be a programmer for that since the needed code can be copied from the Help post we have concerning Server Side Includes. If you want to employ this function for your site, you have to rename your website files from .html to .shtml and you have to double-check if all links on your site point to the updated names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It shall not take you more than a minute to activate Server Side Includes when you've got a semi-dedicated server plan through our company. If you decide to enable this function, you will need to make an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain name or subdomain where you would like SSI to be enabled. In this file, you need to copy and paste some code, which you'll find in the FAQ article we have devoted to SSI. You can get the latter in the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you do not require any prior knowledge of this kind of matters. The only 2 things you ought to take care of are renaming all of web pages that shall utilize Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and updating all of the links on your site, in order that they point to the renamed files.