Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which enables you to incorporate text from a given source in a web page. In the most typical situation, the text from a single file is incorporated in a second one, providing a site the sense that it is dynamic. For instance, in case your website is made of ten web pages, 5 of them can easily contain the content of some file, such as horoscope.txt. As soon as you alter this text file, the new content will come up on all five web pages, which shall help you revise your website much easier than if you had to change an element of all five pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes used to incorporate the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is displayed on the site, the current date and time or the customer's IP address. Every web page that works by using SSI must have a particular extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting

Since our custom cloud hosting platform supports Server Side Includes on a global level, it is possible to use this feature with the shared hosting plans that we offer you and incorporate dynamic content to your sites with a few clicks. SSI can be enabled for each individual domain name or subdomain by putting an .htaccess file in the website folder with a couple of lines of code. Of course, you don't need to be a programmer for that since the necessary code can be copied from the Help article that we have regarding Server Side Includes. If you want to utilize this function for your site, you'll have to rename your website files from .html to .shtml and you will have to double-check if all links on your website lead to the current names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It shall not take you more than a minute to activate Server Side Includes if you have a semi-dedicated server package with our company. If you decide to enable this function, you have to set up an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain name or subdomain where you would like SSI to be enabled. In that file, you have to copy and paste some code, that you can see in the FAQ article that we have devoted to SSI. You'll find the latter within the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't require any prior knowledge of this kind of matters. The only 2 things you need to deal with are renaming all of the pages that shall utilize Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and replacing every one of the links in your site, to make sure they point to the renamed files.