thanks for reading my post. We are in the early stages of a website modernization project and would like to get feedback concerning our migration strategies. In particular, we would like to hear of any possible strategies we might have overlooked. Our current website consists of 2 separate but related websites (marketing and business). These 2 separate websites share common styling and link back and forth between each other and from the users perspective appear to be 1 cohesive website.
Our marketing website (www.OurMarketingSite.org) was originally developed and maintained by an external marketing partner and is hosted by at an external hosting provider. The marketing website has recently been modernized utilizing the following technologies: Win2012, IIS 7, .Net4, MVC3.
Our business website (www.OurBusSite.OurMarketingSite.org) is configured as a sub domain of our primary marketing website (www.OurMarketingSite.org) and is hosted internally outside our firewall on a Win2008 Server with IIS7. This legacy website is a .Net 2.0 website project (not web app) utilizing ASP.NET web forms, it is quite large, fragile and tightly coupled, has lots of dead code, and is in a non-compliable state. In fact, the only place it runs is in our existing production environment. Hence, we have decided to completely rewrite and replace the site.
We have begun the process of creating new Win2012 servers for production and test environments. During the transition period, both the existing 2008 and new 2012 servers will be available and our existing business website (www.OurBusSite.OurMarketingSite.org) will continue to be hosted and maintained on our 2008 server.
In the past, I have been fortunate to have worked on websites which were well designed, written, and meticulously maintained, and upgrades were performed regularly so they were fairly simple and straight forward. I.E. Upgrade the current environments, upgrade the libraries, determine what has broken, fix, build, test, verify, publish, flip the switch, and then remove the old. As you might imagine, that is not the case with this upgrade.
Our plan is to rewrite the complete business website and when done roll out the new website to the new 2012 server and point the sub domain records to the new website. As mentioned this is a large site so this could take a substantial amount of time. If possible, we would like to find an alternative method which would enable us to develop and roll out in multiple small and manageable stages rather than one all-encompassing roll out.
So, is it possible to split our sub domain business website so that it spans 2 separate Windows servers each running an instance of IIS 7? I.e. could we continue to host our current business website (www.OurBusSite.OurMarketingSite.org) on our existing Win2008 server (IIS 7, .net 2.O, un-compiled site) and migrate portions of the site in a piece meal fashion to our new Win2012 server (IIS 7, .Net 4.5, compiled site)? If so, how would we accomplish this? Would we create the new website on our new 2012 server with the same IIS website name as our existing business website except with a different IP address? Would our C record point to the existing 2008 business website on the old server and we create server.transfer or redirects between the pages on the 2 sites?
Thanks again, and help is much appreciated.