Server Side Includes (SSI) is a basic server-side language, which allows you to include text from a specified source in a website. In the most popular case, the text from a file is incorporated in another, giving a website the feeling it is dynamic. For example, in case your site includes ten pages, five of them can easily have the content of some file, like horoscope.txt. As soon as you change this text file, the new content will come up on all of the five web pages, which will allow you to bring up to date your website faster and easier than if you had to update an element of all 5 web pages. Server Side Includes is occasionally utilized to include the output of simple commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is shown on the site, the current time and date or the visitor's IP address. Any web page that utilizes SSI will need to have a unique extension - .shtml.

Server Side Includes in Shared Hosting

It is possible to use Server Side Includes with all of the shared hosting packages we offer and enable it independently for every domain name or subdomain inside of your hosting account. This can be achieved when using an .htaccess file, which needs to be placed into the folder where you wish to use SSI and you have to type in a few lines of code in that file. You can get the code within our Knowledgebase section, so you can simply copy and paste it, since you do not need any programming expertise to take advantage of all functions that our solutions feature. In case you have by now built your website and you want to use Server Side Includes afterwards, you must make certain that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and fix the links on the website, otherwise SSI will not work.