How to hide distributed servers under a single domain?

Question

I currently host my company's website and blog on separate servers, reached by separate domain names - www.example.com and www.example.net. This is so I can give blog server access to our partners without compromising security on our main server. However, our SEO guy is now demanding that the blog be put on our main server, as www.example.com/blog.

I would like to maintain the current server separation rather than putting both on the same server. Is there any good way to keep them separated, but have them both under a single domain name? A subdomain would also be acceptable (blog.example.com).

My main website server is a Debian box running Apache 2, and I have full root access to it. The blog server is run by Hostgator, and I have limited access.

Edit: Thanks, all. In this particular situation I don't particularly want to transfer the blog again, and I don't have easy access to the DNS records, so i went with mod_proxy and it worked like a charm. I wish I could give you all "preferred answer" status, though, because all of your information was awesome.

Answer 1

A subdomain would be easy: just create an A record in DNS which maps blog.example.com to the IP address of the blog server, and have another A record in DNS which maps www.example.com to the main website server (this latter record probably already exists).

Answer 2

Would the SEO guy be happy with blog.example.com? It's not the same from an SEO perspective, but it might be good enough for him. I work at a company where SEO is at least 1/3 of what we do, and that's our setup: blog.example.com and www.example.com.

You could try to get fancy and proxy requests to /blog to the 2nd server, if you insist on keeping the blog off your box, but I think you can find a secure way to share space. Proxying like that could get annoying, and it basically doubles the latency to your blog.

Give the blog guys an account on your box; don't give them root/special privileges. If you can get away with it, don't even give them SSH access -- just give them a FTP login (make sure they can't access /var/www), and maybe a mysql account or something. (As you can see, this all depends on how much control/power the blog folks demand.)

Then, just make a symlink to the blog root, so they can write to a restricted area like /home/blog/www and still have it included in the website:

ln -s ~blog/www /var/www/blog

Answer 3

If a subdomain is for some reason not a possible way for you to go, you could use Apache's mod_proxy module to proxy requests to /blog to your second server.