Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which allows you to include text from a specified source within a web page. In the most typical case, the text from a single file is integrated in a different one, giving a website the sense that it is dynamic. For instance, if your website is made of ten webpages, five of them can easily have the content of any kind of file, for example horoscope.txt. If you alter this text file, the updated content is going to appear on all of the five web pages, which will help you update your website faster and easier than if you had to change a component of all 5 pages. Server Side Includes is occasionally used to incorporate the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's shown on the site, the current time and date or the customer's IP address. Every webpage that makes use of SSI must have a particular extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Web Hosting

As our unique cloud hosting platform supports Server Side Includes on a global level, it will be possible to implement this function with the shared web hosting packages we have and add in dynamic content to your websites with just a few clicks. SSI can be enabled for each individual domain or subdomain by placing an .htaccess file in the website folder with only a few lines of code. Naturally, you don't need to turn into a developer for that as the needed code can be copied from the Help article that we have related to Server Side Includes. If you'd like to employ this feature for your website, you need to rename your site files from .html to .shtml and you will have to double-check if all links on your site lead to the modified names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It will not take you more than a moment to enable Server Side Includes if you have a semi-dedicated server plan with our company. When you decide to enable this feature, you need to make an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain name or subdomain where you would like SSI to be active. In that file, you must copy and paste some code, that you can get in the FAQ article we have dedicated to SSI. You will find the latter in the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't require any previous knowledge of this kind of things. The only 2 things you should deal with are renaming all webpages that will utilize Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and updating all the links in your site, so they lead to the renamed files.