Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which allows you to include text from a given source in a website. In the most common situation, the text from a file is incorporated in another, giving a site the feeling that it's dynamic. As an example, if your website consists of ten pages, five of them can contain the content of some file, like horoscope.txt. If you ever modify this text file, the new content will appear on all five webpages, which shall permit you to update your website faster and easier than if you had to modify part of all five web pages. Server Side Includes is at times utilized to incorporate the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is shown on the site, the present date and time or the visitor's IP address. Every webpage that works by using SSI should have a special extension - .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting
You'll be able to use Server Side Includes with all shared hosting packages that we provide and activate it separately for each domain name or subdomain inside of your hosting account. This can be done with an .htaccess file, which needs to be placed into the folder in which you wish to use SSI and you need to type in a couple of lines of code in that file. You can get the code in our Knowledgebase section, so you can simply copy it, since you don't need any programming expertise to benefit from all functions that our services have. In case you have by now built your website and you wish to use Server Side Includes afterwards, you will need to ensure that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and correct the links on the website, or else SSI is not going to work.
Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers
It will not take you more than a moment to enable Server Side Includes when you've got a semi-dedicated server plan through us. If you decide to enable this function, you will need to create an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain or subdomain where you need SSI to be enabled. In that file, you must copy some code, which you'll get in the FAQ article that we have devoted to SSI. You can find the latter within the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't need any prior experience with these types of things. The only 2 things you need to take care of are renaming all of pages that will utilize Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and editing all the links in your website, in order that they point to the renamed files.