Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which lets you include text from a specific source within a web page. In the most popular case, the text from one file is integrated in a second one, providing a website the feeling it is dynamic. For example, if your site features 10 pages, 5 of them can include the content of some file, such as horoscope.txt. In case you change this text file, the new content is going to appear on all of the five pages, which will enable you to update your site faster and easier than if you had to modify part of all five web pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes employed to incorporate the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's displayed on the site, the present date and time or the visitor's IP address. Every webpage that utilizes SSI will need to have a unique extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Hosting

As our custom cloud hosting platform has Server Side Includes on a global level, it is possible to utilize this function with the hosting plans that we feature and add dynamic content to your sites with just a few mouse clicks. SSI is activated for every specific domain or subdomain by placing an .htaccess file in the website folder with a few lines of code. Naturally, there is no need to turn into a coder for that because the needed code may be copied from the Help post that we have about Server Side Includes. If you want to employ this feature for your website, you need to rename your site files from .html to .shtml and you have to double-check if all of the links on your website point to the current names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

Server Side Includes may be enabled with no trouble with each semi-dedicated server plan that we offer and the entire process will take you only a minute and just a few clicks. You can activate SSI by making an empty .htaccess file inside a domain or subdomain root folder with the File Manager tool in your Hosting Control Panel or an FTP app of your choosing, then typing in a number of lines of code, which you will be capable to copy out of the SSI article in our in depth Knowledgebase. The only thing remaining following that will be to double-check if all of the pages that will implement Server Side Includes are updated from .html to .shtml and to edit backlinks to different pages on your website, in order to represent the changes in the file extensions.