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Self Hosting

Benefits of Self Hosting

By hosting your own dedicated institutional instance of Exhibit, you gain access to the following enhanced capabilities:

  • Custom Domain & DNS - Host Exhibit on your own institution domain (e.g. exhibits.yourinstitution.org).
  • User Accounts & My Exhibits - Authenticate with organisational email addresses using passwordless magic links (/enter). Manage all exhibits created across your team from a centralized administrative dashboard (/admin), and publish exhibits with clean vanity URLs (/<username>/<slug>).
  • Media File Manager - Access a dedicated File Manager to upload images, high-resolution TIFFs, audio, video, and 3D models (GLB). Exhibit automatically generates deep-zoom tiles, thumbnails, and compliant IIIF v3 manifests directly in your Google Cloud Storage bucket.
  • Interactive 3D Objects & Video - First-class support for rotating and annotating 3D Models and sequencing time-based Audio & Video clips (including YouTube).
  • Custom Analytics - Access a dedicated Google Analytics dashboard via Firebase, tracking visitor engagement, completion rates, and embed interactions across all exhibits.
  • Custom Branding & Styling - Commission us or customize themes, fonts, colors, and institutional logos to match your institution's design system.
  • Exhibit Export - Export complete exhibit datasets to integrate with third-party digital asset management (DAM) and collection management systems.

Back-end Architecture

Exhibit uses Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Firebase for all serverless back-end infrastructure:

  • Cloud Firestore Database: Stores exhibits, framing annotations, user profiles, and file metadata.
  • Cloud Functions (2nd Gen): Processes file uploads into multi-resolution pyramid tiles, captures 3D snapshots, extracts AI subject matter tags with Gemini, and generates IIIF manifests.
  • Cloud Storage: Securely hosts your uploaded media assets, image tiles, and manifest endpoints.

These services run within your own Google Cloud organization. You will need a Firebase account on the pay-as-you-go Blaze Plan to enable Cloud Functions and Cloud Storage triggers.

To set up an instance, create a Firebase project named exhibit-<your-project> and contact us for automated provisioning and deployment assistance.

Front-end Application

Exhibit uses Firebase App Hosting to deploy the Next.js application with Server-Side Rendering (SSR). This provides fast page loads, automatic HTTPS, optimized Core Web Vitals, and responsive mobile rendering.