Server Side Includes (SSI) is a well-known server-side scripting language, used to incorporate the content of one file within another file. It's used mostly with online content and it can help to make a static HTML site far more dynamic. If you wish to have a daily quote displayed on numerous webpages of your site, for example, you can make a text file and switch the quote within it each day. All the webpages where this file is integrated are going to show the modified quote, so you'll not need to edit all of them manually each time. SSI could also be used to contain the output of basic functions instead of a static file - for instance, the client's IP address, a hit counter or perhaps the current time and date. This way, you can make your site appear much more professional and a lot more attractive to the website visitors. Pages that implement SSI get a .shtml extension.

Server Side Includes in Shared Website Hosting

As our custom made cloud hosting system features Server Side Includes on a global level, you are able to use this feature with the shared website hosting packages we have and bring dynamic content to your websites with only a few mouse clicks. SSI can be activated for each particular domain or subdomain by placing an .htaccess file in the website folder with just a few lines of code. Of course, you don't need to turn into a programmer for that because the required code may be copied from the Help post that we have related to Server Side Includes. If you wish to use this feature for your website, it's important to rename your website files from .html to .shtml and you've got to double-check if all of the links on your site lead to the up-to-date names.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It will not take you more than a minute to activate Server Side Includes in case you have a semi-dedicated server package with us. If you decide to enable this function, you will need to set up an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain name or subdomain in which you need SSI to be enabled. In this file, you must copy some code, which you can get in the FAQ article we have dedicated to SSI. You can find the latter in the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't need any prior experience with this kind of matters. The only two things you ought to take care of are renaming all pages that shall utilize Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and replacing every one of the links in your website, to ensure that they point to the updated files.