Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which enables you to include text from a specified source within a website. In the most widespread scenario, the text from a file is integrated in another, giving a website the feeling it is dynamic. For instance, if your site comprises of 10 web pages, five of them can easily include the content of some file, such as horoscope.txt. In case you change this text file, the updated content will appear on all five web pages, which shall help you revise your site much easier than if you had to change a part of all five pages. Server Side Includes is in some cases employed to incorporate the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is shown on the website, the current date and time or the visitor's IP address. Every webpage that employs SSI should have a special extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Cloud Hosting

Since our custom made cloud hosting platform supports Server Side Includes on a global level, you are able to use this feature with any of the cloud hosting packages that we offer and add in dynamic content to your websites with only a few mouse clicks. SSI can be activated for each individual domain name or subdomain by placing an .htaccess file in the site folder with just a few lines of code. Certainly, you don't have to become a programmer for that as the needed code may be copied from the Help article that we have concerning Server Side Includes. If you wish to use this function for your website, you'll want to rename your site files from .html to .shtml and you will have to double-check if all of the links on your website lead to the current names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It shall not take you more than a moment to activate Server Side Includes in case you have a semi-dedicated server plan from our company. If you decide to activate this feature, you have to make an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain or subdomain where you want SSI to be active. In that file, you must copy some code, which you can find in the FAQ article we have devoted to SSI. You'll find the latter inside the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't require any previous experience with such things. The only 2 things you need to deal with are renaming all of pages that shall employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and updating each of the links on your website, to make sure they point to the updated files.