Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which enables you to include text from a given source in a web page. In the most popular case, the text from a single file is integrated in a second one, providing a site the feeling that it is dynamic. As an example, if your site is comprised of ten pages, five of them can have the content of some file, like horoscope.txt. Once you change this text file, the new content will appear on all five web pages, which shall let you bring up to date your website much easier than if you had to update a component of all 5 web pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes employed to include the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is displayed on the website, the current time and date or the visitor's IP address. Every web page that makes use of SSI will need to have a special extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting

It will be possible to use Server Side Includes with all of the shared hosting packages that we offer you and activate it separately for each and every domain or subdomain within your hosting account. This can be accomplished with an .htaccess file, which needs to be positiioned in the folder where you want to use SSI and you need to put a few lines of code in that file. You can find the code in our Knowledgebase section, so you can simply copy and paste it, as you don't need any coding skills to benefit from all features that our services have. In case you have already built your website and you want to employ Server Side Includes afterwards, you need to ensure that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and fix the links on the website, or else SSI won't work.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It will not take you more than a moment to enable Server Side Includes when you've got a semi-dedicated server plan through us. When you decide to activate this function, you have to create an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain or subdomain where you want SSI to be active. In that file, you have to copy and paste some code, that you can find in the FAQ article we have devoted to SSI. You can get the latter within the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you do not need any prior knowledge of these types of things. The only two things you should take care of are renaming all of webpages that shall employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and bringing up-to-date every one of the links in your site, so they point to the updated files.