The Easiest Way to Manage Domain Migrations: URL Tunneling

Consider this: Your company acquires a new domain and wants it integrated into your existing infrastructure. The problem is, it’s on a different platform, and is going to take a long and meticulous migration process.

That’s fine, but the marketing department and business stakeholders want it done yesterday. Your options then look like doing a haphazard job to make business stakeholders happy while you then have to patch up the IT work, or go ahead with the migration process with building pressure on you from other departments. SiteSpect offers a simple alternative — URL tunneling.

What Is URL Tunneling?

Because SiteSpect works as a proxy, when we receive a request and proxy it back to the origin we can very easily modify the request so that it looks like it’s for a different domain. For example, let’s say you manage www.example.com, and your company acquires www.anotherexample.com. You need to maintain all of the content from www.anotherexample.com, but move it to www.example.com. This is going to require a migration process that other departments don’t understand. In the meantime, you can use URL Tunneling.

To do this, you simply route the traffic requesting new.example.com content through SiteSpect. When the request hits SiteSpect’s infrastructure, we proxy the request to the www.anotherexample.com origin but modify the request so that it appears as if it is for www.example.com. This means that you can functionally integrate or mimic domains immediately, taking the pressure off while you work on the migration.

Use Cases for URL Tunneling

There are a few very common situations where URL Tunneling comes in handy.

• The example above, where your company acquires a new domain, and you need to migrate them ASAP.
• Your company uses a third-party software for some function — for example ticket sales, registrations, contact requests, etc. Marketing needs these third-party pages to look like they are part of your domain. This would be the quickest and cleanest way to achieve this.
• Your company runs a promotion or event in tandem with another company. You don’t plan to merge domains permanently, but would like requests that call content from the other domain to temporarily appear to be within your own domain. URL Tunneling allows for this without any modification to the actual websites.

Wrap Up

SiteSpect is the only A/B testing solution that operates this way and allows for URL tunneling — along with a host of other IT benefits. A/B testing isn’t only for marketers  — it’s helpful to IT as well. Imagine being able to both deliver immediately and take your time to go through proper process. SiteSpect allows you to do that.

To learn more about SiteSpect, visit our website.