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My ISPs’ Apache servers are configured for index.html and index.htm to be the default documents; however since implementing server side includes in my websites I need index.shtml to be recognised as the default document.
Fortunately, this can be achieved using the following directive in the corresponding .htaccess file:
DirectoryIndex index.shtml index.html index.htm
Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) users can find information on setting up default documents in the IIS 6.0 Operations Guide.