Have different hostings on the same domain

Question

My organization has the following setup:

• https://www.example.com --> Drupal website on AWS, using Apache 2.4.29
• https://www.example.com/static-stuff/whatever --> A node holding the content of a static HTML page in the body.

Now, we aim to decouple the Drupal pages from the static ones. But due to a strange policy from our hosting provider, this will mean that the HTML pages will have to be moved to an external hosting.

To be:

• https://www.example.com --> stay as is
• https://www.example.com/static-stuff/whatever ---> static HTML page, hosted externally (e.g. on Github Pages)

From what I understood, it's easy to achieve this by creating a new subdomain (e.g. https://static-stuff.example.com/whatever) and then a redirection. But is there a way to achieve this without altering the URLs? What type of changes would be required on the Apache and DNS settings?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

A browser will go to whatever IP address www.example.com resolves to in the DNS.

The server running at that address will need to act as a proxy to fetch the static content, or redirect the browser to the external location. There are various ways to do this using HAProxy, mod_proxy, Apache RewriteRules, etc.

However, there is no way to get www.example.com to resolve to different IP addresses based on the path (URL).