Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which enables you to incorporate text from a specific source within a website. In the most popular scenario, the text from one file is incorporated in another, giving a website the sense that it is dynamic. For example, in case your site is made of 10 web pages, 5 of them can easily have the content of some file, such as horoscope.txt. In case you alter this text file, the new content will appear on all five web pages, which shall permit you to update your site faster and easier than if you had to change part of all five web pages. Server Side Includes is at times employed to contain the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's shown on the site, the present date and time or the visitor's IP address. Every webpage that utilizes SSI must have a special extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Website Hosting

Since our customized cloud hosting platform offers Server Side Includes on a global level, it is possible to make use of this function with the website hosting plans that we have and add dynamic content to your websites with only a few clicks. SSI is activated for each particular domain or subdomain by putting an .htaccess file in the website folder with only a few lines of code. Naturally, you do not have to become a developer for that because the required code can be copied from the Help post we have about Server Side Includes. If you wish to use this feature for your website, you will need to rename your site files from .html to .shtml plus you've got to double-check if all links on your site point to the modified names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Hosting

It won't take you over a minute to enable Server Side Includes when you've got a semi-dedicated server package from our company. When you decide to activate this feature, you need to set up an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain or subdomain where you want SSI to be active. In this file, you need to copy some code, which you'll find in the FAQ article we have dedicated to SSI. You can get the latter in the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you do not require any previous knowledge about these types of things. The only two things you must deal with are renaming all of the webpages that will utilize Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and replacing all the links in your website, so that they lead to the renamed files.