Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which lets you incorporate text from a specific source within a web page. In the most common case, the text from a single file is incorporated in a second one, providing a site the feeling it is dynamic. For instance, if your site is made of 10 web pages, five of them can include the content of some file, for example horoscope.txt. Once you modify this text file, the new content is going to appear on all of the five web pages, which will allow you to update your site much easier than if you had to change part of all 5 pages. Server Side Includes is in some cases utilized to contain the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's displayed on the website, the present time and date or the visitor's IP address. Any webpage that utilizes SSI should have a particular extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting

You'll be able to use Server Side Includes with all shared hosting packages we provide and activate it individually for each domain name or subdomain within your hosting account. This can be done when using .htaccess file, which needs to be placed in the folder where you wish to use SSI and you need to enter a few lines of code in that file. You can see the code inside our Knowledgebase section, so you can just copy and paste it, since you do not need any coding capabilities to benefit from all of the characteristics that our solutions feature. In case you have currently built your website and you want to employ Server Side Includes later, you will need to make sure 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

It will not take you more than a moment to enable Server Side Includes if you have a semi-dedicated server plan with us. When you decide to activate this feature, you must create an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain name or subdomain in which you need SSI to be enabled. In this file, you have to copy some code, which you'll get in the FAQ article that we have devoted to SSI. You'll find the latter within the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't need any previous experience with this kind of matters. The only two things you must take care of are renaming all of pages that shall utilize Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and bringing up-to-date every one of the links in your site, to ensure that they lead to the renamed files.