Server Side Includes (SSI) is a widely used server-side scripting language, used to add the content of one file inside a second file. It is used typically with online content and it will help to make a static HTML site more dynamic. If you need to have a daily quote displayed on several web pages on your site, for example, you can make a text file and switch the quote within it every day. All of the web pages in which this file is included will display the updated quote, so you will not have to update every one of them by hand each time. SSI can also be used to contain the output of simple functions instead of a static file - for example, the client's IP address, a hit counter or maybe the current time and date. By doing this, you can make your website look a lot more professional and a lot more appealing to the visitors. Web pages that employ SSI have a .shtml extension.
Server Side Includes in Website Hosting
As our custom made cloud hosting platform offers Server Side Includes on a global level, it is possible to work with this function with the website hosting packages we have and bring dynamic content to your sites with a few mouse clicks. SSI is activated for each specific domain name or subdomain by putting an .htaccess file in the website folder with a few lines of code. Naturally, there is no need to turn into a developer for that because the needed code can be copied from the Help article we have about Server Side Includes. If you wish to utilize this feature for your site, you need to rename your website files from .html to .shtml and you will have to double-check if all links on your site point to the up-to-date names.
Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Hosting
It won't take you over a minute to activate Server Side Includes when you've got a semi-dedicated server plan with us. When you decide to activate this feature, 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 active. In that file, you must copy and paste some code, that you can find in the FAQ article we have dedicated to SSI. You can get the latter within the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you do not require any previous experience with this kind of matters. The only 2 things you ought to take care of are renaming all webpages that shall use Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and bringing up-to-date all of the links on your website, so they point to the renamed files.