Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which lets you incorporate text from a given source in a web page. In the most common scenario, the text from a single file is included in a second one, giving a website the feeling it is dynamic. For instance, if your site features ten webpages, five of them can easily contain the content of any kind of file, like horoscope.txt. As soon as you modify this text file, the updated content will appear on all five webpages, which shall allow you to bring up to date your site faster and easier than if you had to modify a part of all 5 web pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes used to include the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's shown on the site, the current time and date or the visitor's IP address. Any webpage that uses SSI must have a particular extension - .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Hosting
You will be able to use Server Side Includes with all hosting plans that we offer you and activate it individually for every domain name or subdomain inside your hosting account. This can be achieved by using an .htaccess file, which should be placed in the folder in which you wish to use SSI and you have to put a couple of lines of code in that file. You will find the code inside our Knowledgebase section, so you're able to simply just copy it, as you don't need any programming expertise to take advantage of all of the characteristics that our solutions come with. If you have by now 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 site, otherwise SSI is not going to work.
Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers
It won't take you over a minute to enable Server Side Includes if you have a semi-dedicated server package from our company. When you choose to enable this feature, you have to make an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain or subdomain in which you want SSI to be enabled. In that file, you need to copy some code, which you'll find in the FAQ article we have devoted to SSI. You can get the latter within the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you do not need any previous experience with such matters. The only two things you must deal with are renaming all web pages that will use Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and editing each of the links in your website, so that they lead to the updated files.