The story of Read the Docs

Documenting projects is hard, hosting them shouldn’t be. Read the Docs was created to make hosting documentation simple.

Read the Docs was started with a couple main goals in mind. The first goal was to encourage people to write documentation, by removing the barrier of entry to hosting. The other goal was to create a central platform for people to find documentation. Having a shared platform for all documentation allows for innovation at the platform level, allowing work to be done once and benefit everyone.

Documentation matters, but its often overlooked. We think that we can help a documentation culture flourish. Great projects, such as Django and SQLAlchemy, and projects from companies like Mozilla, are already using Read the Docs to serve their documentation to the world.

The site has grown quite a bit over the past year. Our look back at 2013 shows some numbers that show our progress. The job isn’t anywhere near done yet, but it’s a great honor to be able to have such an impact already.

We plan to keep building a great experience for people hosting their docs with us, and for users of the documentation that we host.