Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which allows you to include text from a given source within a website. In the most popular scenario, the text from a single file is integrated in another, providing a site the sense that it is dynamic. For instance, in case your site involves ten webpages, 5 of them can contain the content of some file, for example horoscope.txt. If you modify this text file, the updated content is going to appear on all five pages, which will enable you to revise your site faster and easier than if you had to modify an element of all five web pages. Server Side Includes is occasionally used to incorporate the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's shown on the site, the present time and date or the visitor's IP address. Any web page that works by using SSI will need to have a special extension - .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting
It is possible to use Server Side Includes with all of the shared hosting packages we provide and enable it individually for every domain name or subdomain in your own hosting account. You can do this with an .htaccess file, which should be positiioned in the folder where you want to use SSI and you have to type in a few lines of code in that file. You can see the code within our Knowledgebase area, so you're able to simply just copy and paste it, since you do not need any coding knowledge to take advantage of all of the functions that our solutions have. If you have already built your website and you wish to employ Server Side Includes later, you need to ensure that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and correct the links on the site, otherwise SSI will not work.
Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers
It shall not take you over a moment to enable Server Side Includes when you have a semi-dedicated server package from us. When you decide to activate this feature, you will need to create an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain name or subdomain where you need SSI to be active. In this file, you have to copy some code, which you can find in the FAQ article that we have dedicated to SSI. You'll find the latter inside the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't need any previous knowledge about this kind of things. The only two things you should take care of are renaming all web pages that shall utilize Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and updating all of the links in your website, so that they lead to the updated files.