Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which enables you to incorporate text from a given source in a website. In the most widespread scenario, the text from a single file is included in another, giving a website the feeling it is dynamic. As an example, in case your website has ten webpages, 5 of them can include the content of any kind of file, like horoscope.txt. If you ever alter this text file, the updated content will appear on all of the five pages, which shall help you revise your site much easier than if you had to update part of all five web pages. Server Side Includes is in some cases employed to include 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. Every webpage that makes use of SSI should have a unique extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting

Server Side Includes is present on our progressive cloud hosting system, so regardless of the Linux shared hosting plan you choose, you will be able to use this feature and make your website a lot more dynamic. All you will need to do is to create a file called .htaccess in the main folder for the domain name or subdomain where you wish to use SSI and after that add a handful of lines of code in it. You will not need any kind of coding skills however, since you can simply just copy the needed code from the help section, or our tech support team can assist you enable SSI for any given website. You need to simply modify the extension of any html file which will employ Server Side Includes to .shtml and make sure that all links to these pages on the website are accurate.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

Server Side Includes can be activated without any problem with each and every semi-dedicated server plan that we offer and the entire process shall take you only a minute and just a couple of clicks. You can activate SSI by making an empty .htaccess file within a domain or subdomain main folder with the File Manager tool in the Hosting Control Panel or an FTP app of your preference, then incorporating a couple of lines of code, which you will be able to get from the SSI article inside our detailed Knowledgebase. The only thing left after that shall be to double-check if all of the web pages that will implement Server Side Includes are updated from .html to .shtml and also to update the links to different webpages on your website, so as to represent the changes in the file extensions.