Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which allows you to include text from a specific source within a website. In the most popular scenario, the text from a single file is incorporated in a different one, giving a website the feeling that it is dynamic. As an example, in case your website comprises of ten pages, five of them can have the content of any kind of file, for example horoscope.txt. In case you change this text file, the modified content is going to appear on all five webpages, which shall let you bring up to date your website much easier than if you had to update part of all five pages. Server Side Includes is in some cases used to contain the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is displayed on the website, the present date and time or the visitor's IP address. Every webpage that employs SSI should have a unique extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting

As our customized cloud hosting system offers Server Side Includes on a global level, it will be possible to make use of this function with any of the shared hosting plans that we offer and add in dynamic content to your websites with a few mouse clicks. SSI can be activated for each particular domain name or subdomain by placing an .htaccess file in the website folder with a couple of lines of code. Naturally, you don't need to turn into a coder for that as the needed code may be copied from the Help post that we have about Server Side Includes. If you want to use this function for your website, you'll want to rename your site files from .html to .shtml and you will have to double-check if all of the links on your website lead to the updated names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Hosting

It won't take you over a moment to activate Server Side Includes if you have a semi-dedicated server package through us. If you decide to enable this function, you will need to create an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain or subdomain in which you want SSI to be enabled. In that file, you need to copy and paste some code, that you can see 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 prior experience with such things. The only 2 things you need to deal with are renaming all of the pages that shall employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and replacing all the links in your website, so they lead to the updated files.