Server Side Includes (SSI) is a well-known server-side scripting language, that is employed to include the content of one file within a second file. It's used predominantly with online content and it will help to make a static HTML website much more dynamic. If you need to have a daily quote displayed on a number of webpages within your site, for example, you can make a text file and switch the quote inside it every day. All of the web pages in which this file is integrated are going to display the modified quote, so you will not have to modify them by hand every time. SSI may also be used to include the output of simple functions rather than a static file - for example, the client's IP address, a hit counter or even the current date and time. In this manner, you can make your website appear more professional and more attractive to the website visitors. Web pages that employ SSI have a .shtml extension.

Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting

You will be able to use Server Side Includes with all shared hosting plans that we offer and enable it individually for each domain name or subdomain inside your hosting account. This can be achieved with an .htaccess file, which should be positiioned in the folder where you wish to use SSI and you need to put a couple of lines of code in that file. You can get the code inside our Knowledgebase area, so you can simply just copy it, since you do not need any coding knowledge to take advantage of all capabilities that our solutions come with. In case you have already built your site and you want to use Server Side Includes afterwards, you need to make sure that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and fix the links on the site, otherwise SSI will not work.

Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers

It will not take you over a moment to activate Server Side Includes when you have a semi-dedicated server plan through us. If you decide to enable this function, you will need to set up an .htaccess file in the main folder for the domain or subdomain in which you need SSI to be active. In this file, you need to copy some code, that you can get in the FAQ article we have dedicated to SSI. You can find the latter in the Help section of your Hosting Control Panel, so you don't require any prior knowledge of such matters. The only 2 things you ought to deal with are renaming all pages that shall use Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and bringing up-to-date all of the links in your website, to make sure they point to the updated files.