"Read the Docs":http://readthedocs.org/ is the official documentation host for many open source Python projects. It is built around the "Sphinx":http://sphinx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ documentation toolkit. In the simplest form, we are a hosting provider for Sphinx documentation. However, we have added a lot of features to make this useful. These include:

• Support for svn, hg, git, and bzr.
• Post-commit hooks to automatically build documentation on commit
• A custom Read the Docs styled Sphinx theme.
• Full-text search across all projects.
• Support for VCS tags and branches.
• PDF generation for all documentation.
• Editing of documentation that results in a pull request on github. (Bitbucket doesn't have a pull request API)

Read the Docs has a lot of the standard parts of any website, and also some other intersting parts that are relatively unique. These include:

• Subdomains
• CNAME Support
• Search using Solr and Haystack
• Delayed task execution with Celery
• Front end caching with Varnish
• Deployment with Chef
• Multi-server architecture
• Monitoring with Nagios and Munin

This talk will consist of three parts. The first part is the origin story of the site, how and why it was created over a weekend by 3 people. Then I'll talk about the technology involved as the site has grown. It started out as a very simple site, but as features have been added, it has gotten more complex. Finally I will discus some of the interesting outcomes that come from having a completely open source site, including security and community contributions.