Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which lets you incorporate text from a specific source within a website. In the most common case, the text from a file is integrated in a second one, giving a site the feeling that it's dynamic. As an example, if your website consists of 10 pages, five of them can have the content of some file, for example horoscope.txt. If you alter this text file, the modified content will appear on all of the five webpages, which will allow you to revise your site faster and easier than if you had to update a component of all 5 pages. Server Side Includes is occasionally employed to include the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is displayed on the site, the current date and time or the visitor's IP address. Every web page that makes use of SSI must have a particular extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Web Hosting

Since our custom made cloud hosting platform supports Server Side Includes on a global level, you will be able to work with this function with any of the shared web hosting plans we offer and bring dynamic content to your websites with a couple of mouse clicks. SSI can be enabled for each specific domain or subdomain by inserting an .htaccess file in the site folder with just a few lines of code. Naturally, you do not have to be a developer for that as the required code may be copied from the Help post we have regarding Server Side Includes. If you would like to use this function for your site, you need to rename your site files from .html to .shtml and you've got to double-check if all links on your website point to the updated names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It won't take you more than a moment to activate Server Side Includes if you have a semi-dedicated server package with our company. When you decide to enable this function, you will need to make an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain name or subdomain in which you need SSI to be active. In this file, you must copy some code, which you'll get in the FAQ article we have devoted to SSI. You will find the latter within the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't require any prior experience with these types of things. The only 2 things you need to deal with are renaming all of webpages that shall employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and editing all the links on your website, in order that they point to the updated files.