Is there a way to host my website.com/BLOG URL PATH from a different host than my main website.com host?

[AlexVelazquez]

Is there a way to host my website.com/BLOG URL PATH from a different host than my main website.com host? Is it accomplish-able with DNS settings or are there other considerations that might lead to complications doing this?

Specifically, we are investigating install WordPress on a dedicated host, JUST to power the blog for our main website, but our main website is on an internal proprietary hosting and CMS. So basically we're trying to host:

website.com --> OFF OF CURRENT INTERNAL HOSTING

website.com/blog/ --> OFF OF THIRD PARTY HOSTING (USING WORDPRESS)

I know this is a technical question beyond the scope of SEO, but I'm figuring there are members of the community that may have tried this already so I'm floating it here. Many thanks!

Cheers.

[KevinBudzynski]

The best way of doing it (I'm sure you already know) is on a subdomain. I believe there is a way to do it via a reverse proxy (although I have never done it). See this article. Good luck!

[AlexVelazquez]

Thanks so much for your input! Much appreciated!

[ThompsonPaul]

Yup, using a reverse proxy is the way to do it. Not trivial to set up - you have to have a high level of server administration permissions to do it.

Paul

[AlexVelazquez]

Thanks so much Paul! Is this something that can be setup unilaterally by the new third-party hosting company, or does it have to 'live' and be deployed INSIDE our own org as part of our main hosting architecture in order to server those requests back out to the other third party webhost?

Please let me know if you know. Regardless, the feedback is appreciated!

Cheers

[ThompsonPaul]

The majority of the configuration needs to happen on the server hosting the main website, Alex. Because essentailly, the visitor isn't even going to be aware of the existence of/URL for the other infrastructure. They're going to go to example.com/blog, and example.com's server configuration is going to deliver them the content from someotherserver.com which hosts the WordPress install.

In addition to the proxy configurations, you may need to deal with cookies, SSL configurations and potentially other server header information that needs to be maintained between the requests passing back and forth between the different servers as well.

This is a pretty common requirement in enterprise configurations though - to keep the software running the blog from potentially interfering with or compromising the security of the main site infrastructure. So like I said - eminently do-able, but not trivial to implement.

Does that answer your question?

Paul