Ride45 - 11:05 pm on Jul 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

We have a very large site with about 25,000 images. We currently rank very well for competitive terms, which means we are transferring alot of data to serve up the thousands of images in our catalog. Our infrastructure costs our becoming somewhat high, but we have found a host that would allow us to transfer image data at a very cheap price (the host looks reliable too.

If we setup a subdomain on a server located at the other host (so it will be on a different IP) and just use that to deliver the images, while keeping our main site directory in place on our existing infrastructure, will this affect our ranking. Things I am considering:

* 2 different IP's for content within the same site
* subdomains, and which exist on different servers
* many of our images are already indexed in Google's image search, so we would need to do a redirect.. Is a 302 cool for images or is a 301 required in this scenario too..

At a product level, we'll save hundreds each month, but obviously we need to consider the business implications if our ranking were to take a hit because of this move. THoughts? Thanks...