You might have noticed that our Read the Docs Community site has gotten faster in the past few weeks. How much faster likely depends on how far away you live from Virginia, which is where our servers have traditionally lived.

We have recently enabled a CDN on all Read the Docs Community sites, generously sponsored by CloudFlare. This post will talk a bit more about how we implemented this, and why we’re excited about it.

As part of our ethical advertising model, Read the Docs gives away 10% of our ad inventory to projects, conferences, and other initiatives in the open source community. Many of these projects operate as Read the Docs did in the past with little to no income. These are not groups that traditionally have the resources to use paid advertising.

We have run ads for:

We’ve been running our ethical advertising campaign for over a year now, and it is starting to show success on making Read the Docs more sustainable.

Over this time, we have only been running ads on Read the Docs themed projects. The primary reason for this is making sure that our display of ads is consistent and doesn’t negatively impact the user experience. We’re trying hard to build a sustainability model that respects our users, and making sure things are well designed and unobtrusive is an important part of this.

On Monday, we enabled an ad space on documentation pages hosted on readthedocs.org. We have tested the ad space in the past, and had followed up with a discussion of the implications of advertising. The space was meant to be totally unobtrusive to the browsing and usage of documentation pages, and doesn’t enable third-party tracking of users in any way. This is all in an effort to help raise funds to support continued support and maintenance on the project, and ensure free and open documentation stays available.

Read the Docs is a massive project, and requires a large amount of work to keep running and support. We receive support requests and must tend to the operations of the servers on a daily basis. Neither of these tasks lend to volunteer contributions, they both require dedicated support roles for such a large site. I’ve personally been wearing a pager in support of the project for over 4 years, all on a volunteer basis.