Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which lets you include text from a specific source in a website. In the most widespread case, the text from a single file is incorporated in another, providing a website the sense it is dynamic. As an example, if your website involves 10 web pages, five of them can easily have the content of any kind of file, like horoscope.txt. Once you alter this text file, the modified content will come up on all five pages, which will let you update your site much easier than if you had to change an element of all 5 pages. Server Side Includes is sometimes used to incorporate the output of basic commands, scripts or functions as well - a hit counter that is displayed on the website, the present date and time or the customer's IP address. Any webpage that works by using SSI should have a particular extension - .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Semi-dedicated Servers
Server Side Includes could be activated without difficulty with every single semi-dedicated server plan that we provide you with and the whole process is going to take you less than a minute and simply several mouse clicks. You can activate SSI by setting up a blank .htaccess file inside a domain or subdomain main folder using the File Manager tool in the Hosting Control Panel or an FTP application of your preference, then adding a number of lines of code, which you will be able to copy from the SSI article in our comprehensive Knowledgebase. The one thing remaining following that is to double-check if all pages that will make use of Server Side Includes are updated from .html to .shtml and to change backlinks to different pages on your site, as a way to reflect the modifications in the file extensions.