Host blog on different server? - scaling

Question

Currently I have my companies blog on the same server as our main web app - as in example.com/blog
What would be the easiest way to move the blog to a different server yet still let users either access the blog at example.com/blog or blog.example.com?

Answer 1

Issue 301 HTTP redirects from website.com/blog to blog.website.com
The specifics depend on the server.

Answer 2

The answer that I provide is assuming that you are using Apache as the webserver as this is what I am familiar with. If you are using IIS then you may be able to find a similar solution but I cannot guarantee this.
In the past I have come across similar issues, whereby a client is hosting their main website at www.mydomain.com but their blog is hosted by their marketing guys at blog.mydomain.com. For SEO purposes it ca be beneficial to have the blog appear at www.mydomain.com/blog although this is not physically possible due to the nature of DNS protocols.
The answer is to use an Apache module called mod_proxy which allows you to map the url /blog to a subdomain and this is invisible to the end-user and, more importantly, search engines. CodeHaus have published a good article on Configuring mod_proxy (update 2016: link leading nowhere) and you may like to have a read.
mod_proxy is quite complex and it can take a while to get the settings correct but it is by far the best solution to the problem that you describe.

Answer 3

You can use a simple javascript redirect code such as the one below to redirect the user.
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
window.location = "http://www.example.com/";
//-->
</script>

Answer 4

Are you hosting these servers in your own data center, or are you purchasing hosting? Our corporate site is hosted on multiple servers in our data center. We use load balancers to route traffic to different server farms based upon the URL. So
http://www.foo.com/assets/* might route to a farm of Apache HTTP servers that serve nothing but image files while
http://www.foo.com/apps/* might route to a farm of JEE application servers and
http://www.foo.com/services/* might route to a farm of servers especially designed to host web services and
http://www.foo.com/blog/* might route to a farm of servers that handle nothing but WordPress.
Works great... if you have all of this at your disposal. If you don't, then check out mod_proxy like Matt said (which we used before we bought load balancers).

Answer 5

blog.example.com
blog.example.com is easiest, since you can simply point it to a different IP address.
That is not what I want for a project I'm working on.
example.com/blog
Instead I use Apache mod_proxy to point /blog to another server. Apache docs here.
This worked well:
ProxyPass /blog http://blog.example.com/
ProxyPassReverse /blog http://blog.example.com/
But only after the proxy modules were loaded correctly:
LoadModule proxy_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_html_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy_html.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy_http.so
Notes
Because of CloudFlare I also had to host the blog from a different hostname, not *.example.com.
I added Disallow: / to my blog.example.com/robots.txt. Like this search engines will not start indexing in two locations. And search engines will simply ignore blog/robots.txt.