Server Side Includes (SSI) is a set of directives that will enable you to incorporate the content of a text file inside an HTML file. In this manner, you are able to add some content to a few different webpages in your website and alter it just by editing an individual text file. You can furthermore add the output of different scripts so the present time and date, the IP address of the visitor or the attributes of a file appear on your site. This will let you incorporate some dynamic content to static web pages, making the website more inviting to your visitors and creating a far more professional overall look. It will also be much easier to update this content in comparison with updating every static page one by one. If you want to use Server Side Includes on your site, the pages that include the content of any kind of file must be with extension .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Website Hosting
As our unique cloud hosting system has Server Side Includes on a global level, it is possible to utilize this function with all of the website hosting packages that we offer you and add in dynamic content to your sites with just a few clicks. SSI can be enabled for each particular domain or subdomain by putting an .htaccess file in the website folder with a couple of lines of code. Of course, there is no need to be a programmer for that since the needed code can be copied from the Help post that we have about Server Side Includes. If you'd like to utilize this feature for your website, you'll want to rename your site files from .html to .shtml and you have to double-check if all of the links on your site point to the current names.
Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers
It won't take you more than a moment to enable Server Side Includes when you have a semi-dedicated server plan with our company. When you choose to enable this feature, you have to set up an .htaccess file in the root folder for the domain or subdomain where you want SSI to be active. In that file, you have to copy and paste some code, which you'll see in the FAQ article that we have dedicated to SSI. You can get the latter in the Help area of your Hosting Control Panel, so you do not need any previous experience with such matters. The only two things you must take care of are renaming all of the webpages that will utilize Server Side Includes from .html to .shtml and replacing every one of the links in your site, to ensure that they lead to the updated files.