Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which allows you to include text from a specific source within a website. In the most common situation, the text from one file is incorporated in another, giving a website the sense that it's dynamic. As an example, if your site consists of ten webpages, 5 of them can easily contain the content of some file, like horoscope.txt. Once you modify this text file, the updated content is going to appear on all five webpages, which will allow you to update your website faster and easier than if you had to change a component of all five web pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes used to contain the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is displayed on the site, the present time and date or the visitor's IP address. Every web page that employs SSI must have a particular extension - .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Website Hosting
Server Side Includes is present on our innovative cloud hosting platform, so no matter the Linux website hosting package that you choose, it will be easy to make use of this feature and make your website a lot more dynamic. Everything you must do will be to make a file called .htaccess in the home folder for the domain name or subdomain where you want to use SSI and after that include a handful of lines of code inside it. You won't require any coding skills though, as you're able simply just copy the needed code from our help section, or our tech support team can assist you activate SSI for any specific website. You need to simply customize the extension of any html file that will employ Server Side Includes to .shtml and make certain that all links to those web pages on the site are appropriate.
Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Hosting
It will not take you more than a minute to activate Server Side Includes in case you have a semi-dedicated server package through us. If you decide to activate this feature, you must make an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain name or subdomain where you need SSI to be active. In this file, you must copy and paste some code, which you can find in the FAQ article we have dedicated to SSI. You can get the latter in the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't require any previous knowledge of this kind of things. The only two things you ought to deal with are renaming all pages that will use Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and changing every one of the links on your site, to make sure they point to the renamed files.