Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which allows you to incorporate text from a specific source in a website. In the most widespread situation, the text from one file is included in a different one, giving a website the feeling that it is dynamic. For instance, if your site involves 10 pages, five of them can easily have the content of any kind of file, for example horoscope.txt. If you change this text file, the new content will appear on all five web pages, which will enable you to update your site faster and easier than if you had to modify a component of all five pages. Server Side Includes is at times employed to include the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is displayed on the website, the present time and date or the customer's IP address. Every web page that makes use of SSI will need to have a special extension - .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Website Hosting
As our unique cloud hosting system features Server Side Includes on a global level, you'll be able to implement this function with all of the website hosting plans that we have and incorporate dynamic content to your websites with just a few clicks. SSI can be activated for every individual domain or subdomain by putting an .htaccess file in the site folder with a couple of lines of code. Certainly, there is no need to turn into a developer for that since the required code may be copied from the Help article we have concerning Server Side Includes. If you'd like to utilize this feature for your website, you'll have to rename your site files from .html to .shtml and you've got to double-check if all of the links on your site lead to the updated names.
Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers
It will not take you more than a moment to enable Server Side Includes when you have a semi-dedicated server plan through us. If you decide to enable this feature, you need to create an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain name or subdomain where you need SSI to be active. In this file, you have to copy and paste some code, that you can find in the FAQ article we have dedicated to SSI. You'll find the latter in the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you do not require any prior knowledge of such matters. The only two things you should deal with are renaming all of the pages that shall utilize Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and changing all the links in your website, in order that they point to the updated files.