Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which enables you to incorporate text from a specified source in a web page. In the most typical scenario, the text from a single file is incorporated in another, giving a website the sense that it is dynamic. As an example, in case your website comprises of 10 web pages, five of them can have the content of some file, such as horoscope.txt. If you ever change this text file, the updated content will come up on all five webpages, which will enable you to update your website much easier than if you had to update an element of all five pages. Server Side Includes is occasionally used to include the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's displayed on the website, the current time and date or the customer's IP address. Every web page that uses SSI must have a particular extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Web Hosting

As our customized cloud hosting system features Server Side Includes on a global level, you'll be able to use this function with any of the shared web hosting plans we have and add dynamic content to your sites with just a few mouse clicks. SSI can be activated for each individual domain or subdomain by inserting an .htaccess file in the website folder with only a few lines of code. Of course, there is no need to be a programmer for that as the required code may be copied from the Help post we have concerning Server Side Includes. If you would like to use this function for your website, you will need to rename your site files from .html to .shtml and you've got to double-check if all of the links on your site point to the current names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It won't take you over a moment to enable Server Side Includes if you have a semi-dedicated server plan from our company. When you choose to activate this function, you have to create an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain or subdomain where you would like SSI to be enabled. In this file, you need to copy some code, which you can find in the FAQ article that we have dedicated to SSI. You'll find the latter within the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't require any previous knowledge about these types of matters. The only 2 things you need to deal with are renaming all of pages that shall use Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and editing each of the links on your site, to ensure that they point to the updated files.