Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which allows you to include text from a specified source in a web page. In the most typical case, the text from one file is incorporated in another, providing a website the feeling it is dynamic. As an example, in case your site is made of ten webpages, five of them can have the content of any kind of file, for example horoscope.txt. As soon as you alter this text file, the new content is going to appear on all five pages, which will help you update your site faster and easier than if you had to update a component of all five web pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes employed to incorporate the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is shown on the website, the present time and date or the visitor's IP address. Every webpage that uses SSI should have a unique extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Cloud Hosting

Since our unique cloud hosting platform has Server Side Includes on a global level, it will be possible to make use of this function with all of the cloud hosting plans that we have and add dynamic content to your websites with a couple of clicks. SSI is enabled for every individual domain or subdomain by inserting an .htaccess file in the site folder with a couple of lines of code. Certainly, there is no need to become a developer for that because the required code can be copied from the Help post we have about Server Side Includes. If you would like to utilize this function for your website, you need 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 up to date names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It won't take you more than a moment to activate Server Side Includes in case you have a semi-dedicated server plan from us. When you choose to enable this function, you will need to set up an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain name or subdomain where you need SSI to be active. In this file, you need to copy and paste some code, which you can see in the FAQ article that we have dedicated to SSI. You'll find the latter within the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you do not need any previous knowledge about this kind of matters. The only 2 things you ought to take care of are renaming all webpages that will employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and bringing up-to-date every one of the links on your website, so that they point to the updated files.