Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which enables you to include text from a given source inside a website. In the most common case, the text from a file is included in a second one, providing a site the feeling that it's dynamic. For instance, if your site includes ten web pages, five of them can easily include the content of some file, such as horoscope.txt. Once you alter this text file, the modified content will appear on all five web pages, which shall allow you to bring up to date your site faster and easier than if you had to update a component of all 5 web pages. Server Side Includes is occasionally employed to incorporate the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's shown on the site, the current time and date or the visitor's IP address. Every web page that works by using SSI must have a particular extension - .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Hosting
You'll be able to use Server Side Includes with all hosting plans we offer and activate it individually for each and every domain name or subdomain in your own hosting account. This can be achieved with an .htaccess file, which needs to be placed into the folder where you want to use SSI and you have to enter a couple of lines of code in that file. You will find the code within our Knowledgebase area, so you can just copy and paste it, as you don't need any programming expertise to take advantage of all of the functions that our solutions include. If you have currently built your website and you wish to use Server Side Includes later on, you need to make certain that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and correct the links on the website, otherwise SSI won't work.
Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers
It shall not take you over a minute to enable Server Side Includes when you have a semi-dedicated server plan with our company. When you decide to enable this feature, you have to create an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain or subdomain in which you would like SSI to be active. In this file, you must copy and paste some code, that you can find in the FAQ article that we have dedicated to SSI. You can find the latter in the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you do not require any previous knowledge about these types of matters. The only two things you must deal with are renaming all of pages that will employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and updating all the links in your website, in order that they point to the updated files.