Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which allows you to incorporate text from a specific source in a web page. In the most typical scenario, the text from a file is incorporated in another, providing a website the sense that it's dynamic. For example, if your website involves ten pages, 5 of them can easily contain the content of any kind of file, such as horoscope.txt. Any time you modify this text file, the modified content will come up on all five webpages, which shall let you revise your site much easier than if you had to modify part of all five web pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes employed to incorporate the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is displayed on the site, the current date and time or the visitor's IP address. Every web page that works by using SSI should have a unique extension - .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Shared Web Hosting
All the shared web hosting service that we offer you support Server Side Includes, so you're able to bring in dynamic elements to any static website which you host on our cloud platform. By creating a clear .htaccess file and entering a couple of lines of code inside it, you are able to activate SSI for a domain name or a subdomain. The file involved needs to be inside the exact folder where you are going to use SSI and you can also get the code within our Frequently Asked Questions section, which means you do not need any coding experience. Our 24/7 technical support staff shall also be able to help you with enabling Server Side Includes if you're not certain how to proceed. You should furthermore remember to modify the extension of all of the files that are going to make use of SSI from .html to .shtml and make certain that the links on your site lead to the right files.
Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers
It won't take you over a moment to enable Server Side Includes if you have a semi-dedicated server package with 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 enabled. In that file, you must copy and paste some code, which you'll find in the FAQ article we have dedicated to SSI. You can find the latter inside the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't require any prior knowledge of such matters. The only two things you should take care of are renaming all pages that will employ Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and updating all of the links on your site, in order that they lead to the updated files.