Section Of Website On Another Server

I have a vendor developing a new section of my company's website and the vendor will host and maintain this section of the website which is a different server than my main website. The vendor suggested a subdomain for this new section of the website. However, I feel strongly about not using a subdomain and keeping it as part of the main domain.

The main website is a windows and the vendors server is a windows server.

Is it hard to setup a section of my website hosted on the vendors windows server, but keeping this section a part of the main domain (not a subdomain) on my windows server?

How do I communicate to the vendor what they need to do in the server environment to make this happen?

Thanks in advance!

Solution 1:

If you want to serve contents on different servers using the same FQDN, you'll need to put a reverse proxy in front of them; only a reverse proxy can actually parse HTTP requests and forward them to different servers based on what is being requested.

A reverse proxy can receive requests for, say, www.example.com and then apply rules like "send all requests to server A but if someone asks for www.example.com/somepath send it to server B".

This role is usually performed by a dedicated device (or server), but some firewalls have built-in reverse proxy functions.

If you don't already have a reverse proxy in front of your web site, it will probably be a lot easier to just use a subdomain and point it to the other server, like the vendor suggested.