How can I put a subdirectory on a different server?

Server Config
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I’m running a .net site and I want a wordpress blog with the SEO benefits of a subdirectory rather than a subdomain.

Can anyone explain to me (or point me to a link) what i need to do to set up a subdirectory on a separate server?

Thanks in advance

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Why does it need to be on a separate server?

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You can install PHP to run on a Windows Server quite easily, if you can’t do this and have too run with 2 servers… you will need to proxy the requests from one server to another.

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Can anyone explain to me (or point me to a link) what i need to do to set up a subdirectory on a separate server?

As far as I know, you can’t have only a subdirectory hosted on a different server. It’s not how DNS works. By using the proxy like Tim suggested, the same IP will be presented to the search engines, and I suppose that’s something you were trying to avoid. The good news is that you’re not going to gain any SEO benefit from separating IPs anyway, so you’re better off keeping everything on the same server (assuming your hosting provider offers PHP on its Windows based packages).

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Hello,

You can’t really seperate the directories into different servers, unless they are behind a load balancer or a proxy, and located in the same LAN. DNS system makes the IP decisions before directory selection, so you can’t force it to choose an IP depending on a directory name.

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Reverse proxy is your huckaberry – we are doing exactly that on a site we operate. If you are running on IIS7 it is pretty easy. There are some wonky bits of wordpress that don’t particularly like it but those are typically not a problem when the blog isn’t the site per se.

If you can run the wordpress on the same machine, you might have a decent shot about just running it in an application hanging off your site – it shouldn’t have the typical configuration fight with the main application.

PS: as to why it’s on a different server, we really don’t want the security risk that wordpress is running on the same thing with our apps. We’ve got a machine affectionatlly known as “spearcatcher” that runs wordpress and other popular open source packages written in languages beginning with P.

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