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 widespread scenario, the text from one file is included in another, giving a site the sense that it is dynamic. For example, in case your website has ten web pages, 5 of them can contain the content of some file, such as horoscope.txt. If you ever alter this text file, the updated content is going to appear on all five webpages, which shall permit you to update your website much easier than if you had to update an element of all 5 pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes utilized to contain the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is shown on the site, the current date and time or the customer's IP address. Any web page that makes use of SSI must have a unique extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Web Hosting

Server Side Includes is present on our progressive cloud hosting platform, so whatever the Linux web hosting package that you choose, it's possible to use this function making your site much more dynamic. All you need to do will be to create a file called .htaccess in the main folder for the domain or subdomain where you wish to use SSI and then include a number of lines of code inside it. You won't require any coding skills however, as you're able to simply just copy the needed code from our help section, or our tech support team can assist you to enable SSI for any given website. You just need to change the extension of the html file that will use Server Side Includes to .shtml and make sure that all of the links to these web pages on the site are accurate.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Hosting

It shall not take you more than a minute to activate Server Side Includes when you have a semi-dedicated server package from us. If you decide to activate this feature, you must set up an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain name or subdomain in which you want SSI to be active. In this file, you have to copy some code, that you can see in the FAQ article that we have dedicated to SSI. You will find the latter in the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't need any previous knowledge of this kind of matters. The only two things you should take care of are renaming all web pages that shall utilize Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and editing all of the links on your website, to make sure they lead to the renamed files.