Webhost is down. Will this affect my ratings?

bots crawl when site is down

[pele]

My webhost is currently experiencing problems and all my sites are down. My webhost's site is down too. None of my domain emails are working.
This has been going on for HOURS.
Google crawls my sites every day. I noticed that they did try to crawl today on a few pages already.
How is this going to affect my sites? What happens if they crawl and the sites don't come up? Will I be dropped?

Thanks for any info!

[Marcia]

It's a common occurrence, some of mine were down for hours - one for a whole day last month with no affect on inclusion in the index. If it's a frequent thing with that host you might consider changing. If a site drops out it's temporary, but from what I've seen it's not immediate if it happens and the site'll get back in. Chances are it'll be OK - they'll be back and catch it when the site is back up again.

[pele]

Hi Marcia,

Good to know. Seems to be working okay now. I'm waiting for some response now on why it happened. Never had the sites down before with this host, just email problems every now and then due to DOS attacks or heavy spam problems. Hoping this never happens again because it's the reason I switched to this host from my previous host.

But it did make me nervous knowing the search engine bots are always checking my sites.
Thanks!

[Marcia]

pele, the search engines have got to know this kind of thing happens. It can be a server issue, maybe even rebooting, and other times it can be a network issue somewhere along the way.

[pele]

Maybe they are programmed to keep trying if they get no answer like those junk faxes I seem to get.

;)

[johnnydequino]

Yesterday there must have been an internet problem. My website was down for hours as well, so was many others. Google will not give a penalty for this.

jd

[kaled]

If your site is small (and static html) I suggest you upload it again. There appears to be a bug whereby pages that vanish as a result of spidering when a site is down do not reappear until the page is updated.

Hmm, I wonder if I'm allowed to use the word bug? I suppose it's ok so long as I don't mention Google in the same post - drat I've blown it now.......

Kaled.

[pele]

johnnydequino - we must have the same webhost. I found out that they suffered a massive ddos attack and had to shut down the affected server.

kaled - my site hasn't vanished I was just wondering if it would cause that to happen if they didn't fix the problem soon. Even if it did vanish, I think I'd rather wait it out then re upload all the sites!
;)
thanks!