Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which lets you include text from a given source within a web page. In the most widespread case, the text from a single file is integrated in a second one, providing a site the feeling that it's dynamic. As an example, if your site features ten pages, five of them can include the content of some file, for example horoscope.txt. Any time you alter this text file, the new content will come up on all of the five web pages, which will help you bring up to date your site faster and easier than if you had to modify an element of all 5 pages. Server Side Includes is at times employed to incorporate the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's displayed on the website, the current time and date or the visitor's IP address. Every web page that utilizes SSI should have a unique extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Web Hosting

You'll be able to use Server Side Includes with all of the web hosting packages that we offer and activate it individually for each and every domain name or subdomain in your own hosting account. This can be accomplished when using an .htaccess file, which needs to be placed in the folder in which you want to use SSI and you have to put a couple of lines of code in that file. You can see the code within our Knowledgebase area, so you're able to just copy it, as you do not need any programming capabilities to benefit from all functions that our services come with. In case you have already built your website and you want to employ Server Side Includes afterwards, you will need to make sure that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and correct the links on the site, otherwise SSI won't work.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Hosting

It will not take you more than a moment to activate Server Side Includes if you have a semi-dedicated server package through us. When you decide to enable this feature, you must make an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain name or subdomain where you would like SSI to be enabled. In this file, you have to copy and paste some code, which you can see in the FAQ article we have devoted to SSI. You can get the latter in the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't need any prior knowledge of these types of matters. The only two things you need to deal with are renaming all of the web pages that shall employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and updating every one of the links in your site, so that they point to the renamed files.