Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which allows you to include text from a given source within a web page. In the most popular situation, the text from a file is integrated in another, giving a website the sense that it is dynamic. For example, in case your website involves 10 webpages, five of them can easily contain the content of some file, like horoscope.txt. In case you change this text file, the new content is going to appear on all five webpages, which will allow you to update your site much easier than if you had to update a component of all five pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes used to incorporate the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is displayed on the site, the current date and time or the customer's IP address. Every webpage that employs SSI should have a special extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting

You will be able to use Server Side Includes with all of the shared hosting packages that we provide and enable it independently for every single domain or subdomain within your hosting account. This can be done when using an .htaccess file, which needs to be placed into the folder in which you wish to use SSI and you need to enter a couple of lines of code in that file. You can get the code within our Knowledgebase area, so you're able to just copy and paste it, as you do not need any coding knowledge to benefit from all characteristics that our solutions feature. In case you have currently built your website and you want to use Server Side Includes later on, you need to ensure that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and fix the links on the website, otherwise SSI won't work.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

Server Side Includes may be activated with ease with every semi-dedicated server plan that we offer and the full process will take you under a minute and only a few mouse clicks. You can activate SSI by creating an empty .htaccess file within a domain name or subdomain main folder with the File Manager tool in your Hosting Control Panel or perhaps an FTP application of your choosing, then adding a couple of lines of code, which you will be able to copy out of the SSI article within our extensive Knowledgebase. The only thing remaining then will be to double-check if all webpages that shall use Server Side Includes are renamed from .html to .shtml and also to alter backlinks to different webpages on your site, to reflect the changes in the file extensions.