Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which enables you to include text from a given source within a website. In the most popular situation, the text from a file is integrated in another, giving a website the sense that it's dynamic. As an example, if your site is comprised of 10 web pages, five of them can include the content of any kind of file, such as horoscope.txt. If you alter this text file, the updated content will appear on all five web pages, which shall allow you to bring up to date your website much easier than if you had to modify a part of all 5 pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes used to include the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is shown on the site, the present date and time or the customer's IP address. Any web page that employs SSI should have a unique extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting

Since our customized cloud hosting platform features Server Side Includes on a global level, you are able to use this feature with any of the shared hosting plans we offer and bring dynamic content to your websites with a few clicks. SSI can be activated for every particular domain or subdomain by inserting an .htaccess file in the site folder with a couple of lines of code. Of course, you do not have to be a developer for that since the needed code can be copied from the Help article that we have regarding Server Side Includes. If you would like to use this function for your site, you need to rename your website files from .html to .shtml and you've got to double-check if all links on your site lead to the up-to-date names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It will not take you more than a moment to enable Server Side Includes when you've got a semi-dedicated server plan with our company. When you choose to enable this function, you will need to make an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain or subdomain in which you need SSI to be active. In this file, you need to copy and paste some code, that you can get in the FAQ article that we have devoted to SSI. You can get the latter inside the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you do not require any previous experience with these types of matters. The only 2 things you need to take care of are renaming all of the web pages that will employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and replacing all of the links on your website, so that they point to the renamed files.