One domain - Multiple servers

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

Can I have the root domain pointing to one server and other URLs on the domain pointing to another server without redirecting, domain masking or HTML masking?

Dealing with an old site that is a mess. I want to avoid migrating the old website to the new environment. I want to work on a page by page and section by section basis, and whatever gets ready to go live I will release on the new server while keeping all other pages untouched and live on the old server.

What are your recommendations?

[LoganRay]

You can find more details about how a reverse proxy works here. Regarding the setup, unfortunately that's outside of my wheelhouse - we had to rely on the tech support team to help out with that.

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

Thanks!

Can you please explain in more detail how this is set up and what it is?

Would that affect the SEO in any way?

[LoganRay]

Hey there,

Sounds like you need a reverse proxy. I recently had a client that was going to migrate small portions of their site over a few months, and this is what we ended up recommending. The situation was this (sounds similar to yours): The client was moving a site with about 1,800 pages from one development firm to another, each with their own proprietary CMS and hosting services. The reverse proxy was essentially a connection between the 2 servers. A URL was requested on server 1, the original developer, the reverse proxy mapped that URL to content on server 2, the new developer. The result was the URLs from server 1 stayed the same, but the content came from server 2 for any URL that had been mapped in the reverse proxy.

NOW FOR A WORD OF CAUTION: This reverse proxy worked great, until security settings on one of the servers prevented requests from coming through, which resulted in dead URLs. So if you're going to move forward with this, be sure that your servers will play nice with each other and not block requests from the other.