Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which allows you to include text from a specified source in a website. In the most widespread situation, the text from one file is included in another, providing a website the feeling that it's dynamic. For example, if your website involves ten web pages, 5 of them can contain the content of some file, like horoscope.txt. Any time you alter this text file, the new content will appear on all of the five webpages, which shall permit you to revise your site much easier than if you had to update an element of all five pages. Server Side Includes is at times employed to include the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's displayed on the site, the current time and date or the customer's IP address. Every webpage that works by using SSI will need to have a unique extension - .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting
You will be able to use Server Side Includes with all shared hosting packages we provide and activate it individually for every single domain or subdomain inside of your hosting account. This can be accomplished when using .htaccess file, which should be placed into the folder in which you want to use SSI and you need to put a few lines of code in that file. You will find the code in our Knowledgebase area, so you can just copy it, as you do not need any coding capabilities to benefit from all capabilities that our solutions include. In case you have already built your site and you want to use Server Side Includes later, you need to make sure that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and fix the links on the site, otherwise SSI is not going to work.
Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers
It will not take you over a moment to enable Server Side Includes if you have a semi-dedicated server package from our company. When you decide to activate this function, you must create an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain name or subdomain where you need SSI to be enabled. In that file, you must copy some code, which you can find in the FAQ article that we have dedicated to SSI. You can get the latter inside the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you do not require any previous experience with this kind of matters. The only two things you ought to deal with are renaming all of the pages that will employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and updating all the links in your website, to ensure that they point to the updated files.