Out of the box I don't think it would not be possible to have several site sections for a single domain. However you might consider a custom rewriter which would allow you to mock the behaviour you've spoken about. You can make all pages appear to be under a single domain while actually being on different parts of the page tree.
My personal feeling is that the rewriter solution could be a lot of a pain. Personally I'd put together a migration plan to move under the same start page and disable the languages that are not appropriate to avoid the translation problem you were talking about.
Its also worth noting that my suggested approach puts the client in better shape for a CMS 6 upgrade as they'd only have to pay for a single site license.
I did something similar a couple of years ago on EPiServer 5. What we ended up doing was moving the local websites into virtual directories so that they were still separate web applications.
That's a great work around Ted. Did this work out the box or did you have to do any customisation to make things work?
I'm tempted to try your solution Ted, but I have the same question as David: Did you have to do any customizations to make it work? And what about the web.config, that's inherited by the parent site and I can imagine that causing some trouble?
A customer has an enterprise site with at least 8 different domains. Each language has a different startpage, so there are several <site> sections in the web.config file with <sitesettings> specifying the startPageId.
This works without problems. The issue now is that they want to trash all the domains except for .com. So a site that previously was www.mysite.no will now be www.mysite.com/no
We cannot remove the separate <site> sections in web.config as each site has a different startpage. If we set the hostheaders to www.mysite.com/XX where XX is any language code, all pages are displayed in the language of the first <site> section.
Does EPiServer support several <site> sections for the same domain? Is there any way we could solve this without merging all the sites into one so that they have the same startpage?