Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which allows you to include text from a specific source inside a web page. In the most typical situation, the text from a single file is included in a second one, providing a site the sense that it is dynamic. For example, if your site features ten web pages, 5 of them can easily contain the content of any kind of file, for example horoscope.txt. If you change this text file, the modified content will appear on all five webpages, which shall enable you to revise your site faster and 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's shown on the website, the present time and date or the visitor's IP address. Every webpage that makes use of SSI will need to have a unique extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Web Hosting

It is possible to use Server Side Includes with all web hosting plans we provide and enable it separately for every domain name or subdomain in your hosting account. This can be done by using an .htaccess file, which needs to be placed into the folder where you wish to use SSI and you have to type in a couple of lines of code in that file. You can see the code within our Knowledgebase area, so you're able to simply just copy it, as you don't need any programming knowledge to take advantage of all characteristics that our solutions have. If you have already built your site and you would like to use Server Side Includes later on, you must make sure that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and correct the links on the website, otherwise SSI is not going to work.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Hosting

It shall not take you more than a moment to activate Server Side Includes if you have a semi-dedicated server package through our company. When you choose to activate this function, you will need to create an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain name or subdomain in which you would like SSI to be active. In that file, you need to copy some code, which you'll see in the FAQ article that we have devoted to SSI. You'll find the latter in the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't require any prior knowledge about such matters. The only 2 things you ought to take care of are renaming all webpages that shall employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and bringing up-to-date all of the links in your website, so they lead to the renamed files.