Same Domain, Different Directories to Different Servers

[eskipii]

Anyone know what is the correct way to do this:

(I'm not even sure what this corrert called.)

The domain is example.com & it resides on a sever in X location
Can:
example.com/directoryA be hosted in a different server in location Y?
example.com/directoryB be hosted in a different server in location Z?

Is there a guide/howto on how to setup something like this...

thanks for any ideas.

[carguy84]

We use a layer 4-7 switch to do this. It's built into our load balancer(Radware).

Chip-

[eskipii]

our host says that this can only be done with subdomains:

directoryA.example.com/
directoryB.example.com/

the reason I wanted to remain the same as the current structure was for search engine ranking.

will changing to subdomains hurt the current ranking for the directories?

thanks for the ideas

[physics]

Are you on Apache or IIS? On Apache you could use mod_rewrite and there are ways on IIS. If you need to switch the subdirs to sudomains you can set up a 301 redirect, which _theoretically_ will preserve your rankings to some degree as long as you leave the redirect up there permanently. Look up "301 redirect" and "mod_rewrite " for more info ;)
Also, why do you need subdirs on different servers? That seems like overkill/overcomplication to me...

[carguy84]

Your host sounds scary.

Physics, it works great especially for multimedia hosting

http://www.example.com/images
/images can be a transparent redirect to an image server farm, but the URL remains something like:
http://www.example.com/images/image1.jpg

instead of [imagesserve1.example.com...]

Makes management a LOT easier, albeit more expensive in the beginning.

Chip-