Hosting

DeveloperHub makes hosting a breeze for you. We offer multiple ways in which you can have your docs hosted:

You can also host multiple projects on the same site.

Which Hosting Option is Better?

Your readers would like to get a familiar URL when they visit your docs, so we always encourage you to host the docs on a domain that you own, like pied-piper.com.

However, it isn't only readers that access your docs. In fact, all kinds of bots and crawlers access it as well to index it for search engines. Allowing the search engines to crawl is very important for your search ranking. For search engines, every host is a different entity, that is unrelated to the root domain. For example, docs.pied-piper.com has a completely different ranking than pied-piper.com.

If you are starting with a docs site for the first time at docs.pied-piper.com, then you're starting with a fresh slate. Your ranking still has to grow from the start. So we recommend that you use Hosting under an Existing Website hosting option so you can pick up the ranking from your root domain at pied-piper.com since that is probably where all the marketing has been done previously.

If you already had a docs site and you're moving to DeveloperHub, then you are picking up the ranking you already had.

In conclusion: Use Hosting under an Existing Website if possible, otherwise it's totally fine to host Using Custom Domain.

Hosting under DeveloperHub Subdomain

To set or change the subdomain:

1. Click on Project Settings in the sidebar.
2. Under Subdomain, click on Edit to enable edit mode.
3. Change the subdomain.
4. Click on Save. If the subdomain was already taken, then you will be notified.

Hosting under your own Custom Domain

Follow the steps in Using Custom Domain.

Hosting under an Existing Website

If you already have a website, for example pied-piper.com and you would like to host your docs under pied-piper.com/docs, then you can do this by modifying the basepath and setting up a reverse proxy from your servers. A step-by-step guide is as follows:

• On DeveloperHub:

  1. Click on Project Settings in the sidebar.
  2. Enter the basepath where your want your docs to live, such as docs or hooli. It could be a deeper subdirectory, such as docs/project1.
  3. Under Basepath, click on Edit to enable edit mode.
  4. Click on Save.
  5. Under Custom Domain, click on Edit to enable edit mode.
  6. Enter the host where the existing website lives, such as pied-piper.com or support.pied-piper.com.

• On your server:

  • Set up a reverse proxy to your DeveloperHub subdomain, such as with nginx. Here is an example configuration:

server {

  server_name <custom-domain>; # e.g. server_name support.pied-piper.com

​

  location /docs {

    proxy_pass https://<subdomain>.developerhub.io; # e.g. proxy_pass https://piper.developerhub.io

    proxy_http_version 1.1;

    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;

    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";

    proxy_set_header Host $host;

    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Uri $request_uri;

    proxy_set_header X-User-Agent $http_user_agent; # Required if using a CDN

  }

}

Make sure that you do not add trailing forward slashes for location URI and proxy_pass URI as indicated in the example. Adding them may break SEO or domain settings.

You may also use the approach above to set up your own custom redirection rules if needed, leaving the base path empty.

Setting up your application firewall when hosting under an existing website

When you are hosting under an existing website and you have an application firewall running, you must perform the following:

1. Whitelist DeveloperHub.io SSR user agent for all URLs in the docs site. This ensures that we can serve the pages to search indexing robots for SEO purposes. See SEO troubleshooting.
2. Whitelist DeveloperHub.io PDF Exporter user agent for all URLs in the docs site. This ensures that PDF exports are enabled.

Hosting Multiple Projects under One Site

To host multiple projects under one site, you can set multiple projects to be on a single subdomain or a single custom domain. You must be the owner of all these projects. If you are under an enterprise plan, then all of the projects must be in the same organisation.

For example, you may setup three projects to be as such:

• Project: Product Documentation

  • Custom domain: docs.pied-piper.com.
  • No base path.
  • Accessible at https://docs.pied-piper.com/.

• Project: Knowledge Base

  • Custom domain: docs.pied-piper.com.
  • Base path: kb.
  • Accessible at https://docs.pied-piper.com/kb.

• Project: Release Notes

  • Custom domain: docs.pied-piper.com.
  • Base path: release-notes.
  • Accessible at https://docs.pied-piper.com/release-notes.

When multiple projects are hosted under a subdomain or a domain, will show next to the setting input.

Performance Troubleshooting

If your docs site is loading slow, then you might want to check any middleware (such as Cloudflare) that you are using to serve the domain. Also, if you are using reverse proxy then ensure that your servers are performant. Furthermore, if you are using any middleware, ensure that the middleware is passing the query string to our servers, otherwise some functionality might not work.

Our own docs load in under 200ms from Europe. Our largest docs load in under 1s from San Fransisco.

Furthermore, Cloudflare's rocket loader might cause the site to not load any scripts or styles. Please disable it if you encounter issues.