Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which allows you to incorporate text from a given source within a website. In the most widespread case, the text from one file is incorporated in a second one, giving a website the sense that it is dynamic. For example, if your site has 10 webpages, five of them can have the content of any kind of file, for example horoscope.txt. Any time you modify this text file, the modified content will come up on all five webpages, which will enable you to update your site faster and easier than if you had to modify an element of all five pages. Server Side Includes is occasionally used to contain the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's shown on the website, the current time and date or the visitor's IP address. Every webpage that uses SSI must have a special extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Website Hosting

It will be possible to use Server Side Includes with all shared website hosting packages that we offer and activate it independently for each and every domain name or subdomain inside your hosting account. This can be achieved by using an .htaccess file, which should be put into the folder where you wish to use SSI and you need to type in a few lines of code in that file. You'll find the code inside our Knowledgebase area, so you can simply copy it, as you don't need any programming knowledge to benefit from all of the capabilities that our services have. In case you have by now built your site and you want to use Server Side Includes later on, you have to ensure that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and fix the links on the website, otherwise SSI will not work.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It shall not take you more than a moment to activate Server Side Includes in case you have a semi-dedicated server plan from our company. When you choose to enable this feature, you have to set up an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain name or subdomain where you would like SSI to be active. In that file, you have to copy and paste some code, which you'll get in the FAQ article that we have devoted to SSI. You will find the latter in the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't need any prior knowledge of this kind of things. The only 2 things you ought to deal with are renaming all webpages that shall employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and changing each of the links on your website, to ensure that they lead to the renamed files.