Server Side Includes (SSI) is a simple server-side language, which enables you to include text from a specified source within a web page. In the most common scenario, the text from a file is integrated in a second one, providing a site the feeling that it's dynamic. For instance, if your website involves 10 pages, five of them can easily have the content of any kind of file, such as horoscope.txt. If you alter this text file, the updated content is going to appear on all five webpages, which will permit you to update your site much easier than if you had to update a component of all 5 pages. Server Side Includes is in some cases used to contain 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 webpage that makes use of SSI must have a unique extension - .shtml.
Server Side Includes in Cloud Website Hosting
As our custom cloud hosting platform supports Server Side Includes on a global level, it's possible to work with this function with the cloud website hosting plans we offer you and add in dynamic content to your sites with a few mouse clicks. SSI is enabled for each particular domain or subdomain by inserting an .htaccess file in the website folder with only a few lines of code. Certainly, there is no need to become a programmer for that since the needed code may be copied from the Help article we have related to Server Side Includes. If you want to utilize this feature for your website, you will need to rename your website files from .html to .shtml and you have to double-check if all of the links on your site lead to the current names.