What is subfolder hosting?

Subfolder hosting is a type of website hierarchy under a root domain that uses folders to organize content on a website. A subfolder is the same as a subdirectory; the names can be used interchangeably.

The subfolder/subdirectory comes after the root directory or domain name in a URL.

For example, Document360’s root domain is document360.com. So a subfolder/subdirectory path URL might be document360.com/docs/.


Most companies host their documentation under a subfolder/subdirectory on their website domain.

For example: example.com/docs, example.com/support, etc.

This is because hosting a knowledge base on a subdirectory/subfolder of a website (example.com/docs) rather than a subdomain (docs.example.com) is better for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Subfolder/subdirectory hosting can be enabled for Document360 provided domains and mapped custom domains.


Enabling Subfolder hosting

To enable the subfolder hosting for your project,

  1. Go to the desired project in Knowledge base portal
  2. Click Settings → Knowledge base site → Custom domain → Sub folder hosting(tab)
  3. By default, the Subfolder path is set to /docs
  4. Turn on the toggle next to "This documentation is hosted on a sub folder."

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Custom sub folder paths

You can also set up your knowledge base on subfolder/subdirectory paths other than /docs.

For example, /help, /support, etc.

  1. On the Document360 Knowledge base portal
  2. Go to Settings → Knowledge base site → Custom domain → Sub folder hosting(tab)
  3. By default, the Subfolder path is set to /docs
  4. Click inside the field, delete the docs and type in your custom subfolder path (For example, /help)
  5. Click on the Update button on the right
  6. This new custom subfolder would only work in the subfolder hosting setting is enabled in your project

When setting up other paths, add the languages associated with each workspace in your project. This configuration varies depending on the different web servers.

Article preview limitation

For projects configured with custom domain and subfolder hosting, the "Article preview" is not supported yet.


Web servers

Here are some of the commonly used web servers

  • Apache HTTP server
  • Nginx server
  • ASP.NET Core server
  • Microsoft - IIS server
  • OpenResty server
  • LiteSpeed server
  • Cloudflare server

What is a web server?

A web server stores and delivers the content for a website – such as text, images, video, and application data – to clients that request it. The most common type of client is a web browser program.


What happens next?

Once the web server is successfully configured, your knowledge base site will be live on your custom subfolder/subdirectory. However, the existing URL for your project will serve the requests.

For example, example.document360.io and example.com/docs (if /docs is your folder path) will point to the Knowledge base site.

This will cause duplicate content in Search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). For this, you will need to enable a URL redirect.

To enable the redirect from example.document360.io to example.com/docs, please contact us at support@document360.com.