Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which allows you to include text from a specific source inside a website. In the most common scenario, the text from a file is included in another, providing a site the feeling that it is dynamic. For instance, if your site has 10 pages, five of them can include the content of any kind of file, like horoscope.txt. In case you change this text file, the new content is going to appear on all of the five webpages, which will let you update your site faster and easier than if you had to update a component of all five pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes used to incorporate the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that's shown on the site, the current time and date or the visitor's IP address. Every web page that makes use of SSI will need to have a unique extension - .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Shared Website Hosting
It will be easy to use Server Side Includes with all of the shared website hosting packages that we offer and activate it independently for each domain or subdomain in your own hosting account. This can be achieved by using an .htaccess file, which needs to be positiioned in the folder where you want to use SSI and you need to type in a few lines of code in that file. You can see the code in our Knowledgebase section, so you can simply just copy and paste it, as you don't need any coding capabilities to benefit from all functions that our services come with. In case you have already built your site and you want to employ Server Side Includes afterwards, you will need to make certain that you rename the files from .html to .shtml and correct the links on the site, otherwise SSI won't work.