12 hour planned network outage

Will it hurt our SEO efforts?

[paladin]

Our site is on a dedicated server with a hosting company that we are very happy with. The hosting company just informed us that there will be a 12 hour planned network outage in August. Our site has some decent rankings for our keywords and phrases that we do not want to loose. Looking for some advice from you guys and gals.

We have 2 options as I see it:
1. Do nothing, and just live with the half day of downtime.
2. Move the site to a temporary server in a different location with a different IP address a week before the outage and then move it back after the outage.

Will doing nothing, and just live with the half day of downtime hurt our rankings?

If we move the site to a temporary server a week before the outage and then move it back after the outage will this change in location and IP address affect our rankings? If so, how?

thanks

[ShunT]

Think about your visitors first. Will they mind the downtime? Do you have a lot of traffic that would suffer from this downtime? Will you loes enough revenue to compensate paying for a temporary solution? If Yes to those I would move. But don't do it just for Google.

I had a similar thing happen, basically Google just used my "error" page in the SERPs for 1 day (because my site gets crawled many times a day). The ranking stayed the same and continued as normal after that. It normaly takes Google a few crawls to change their mind on what topic a site is. Maybe they know things like this happen?

I wish you luck,

[Wibfision]

Hi There,

I posted a similar question a couple of weeks ago here: [webmasterworld.com...]

I have decided to leave my site where it is. The downtime is tonight - I will let you know what happens.

[paladin]

ShunT,
As far as the visitors being annoyed...the planned outage is on a Saturday and the theme of the site is Jewish, so not many people will be trying to get to the site during the outage.

Wibfision,
I'll look for your post next week to see how it goes.

thanks

[walkman]

I don't see any G problems; 12 hrs is nothing.

I had banned G for about 10-12 days (off & on as I was changing content) and eventually they delisted me, but was bak up within a week of allowing them. That was close to two weeks. In your case, GB will give up and come back the next day, or later the same day. Nothing will chang IMO. They know that sites go down, delays etc. etc.

[julinho]

12 hours outage?
On a few occasions, my hosts had to physically move entire datacenters, and those were big ones; they warned that clients might experience a few minutes downtime during the transition.
I know I wouldn´t be happy with a 12 hours outage.

[paladin]

I know I wouldn´t be happy with a 12 hours outage.

I'm not. But giving me more than a month's notice makes it easier to swallow. Like I said at the begining we are happy with the curent hosting company, so we are treating this as nothing more than a minor hickup.

[MikeNoLastName]

Obviously you host with the same folks we do, starts with v ends with web. They sent US a message that it would be SIXTEEN HOURS starting at MIDINGHT (EST?) Friday until 4pm Sat! And that WE had to shut our own server down 15 minutes prior. Seems pretty %^# hoakey to me. What does YOURs say?

We've been with a subsidiary of theirs (whom we liked because they were located in Baltimore which is about as safe weather/flood/earthquake-wise as you can get) for almost 7 years and a few years ago THEY moved all their hardware PHYSICALLY, in a truck, from Baltimore to Florida where they are now with V. Trucks have accidents. We were going to be down for 3 DAYS! We insisted they set us up a new server in FL first and let us backup and transfer everything. At that time we were paying them 3x as much, so they let us do it.

Seems like an awfully long time to me to "move" things next door as they claim. (gee, wonder how many will get dropped and stepped on, on the way) What's the matter, are they going to disconnect the power from one building, then move all the hardware, THEN reconnect it next door? Sounds REALLY HOAKEY to me. We've already started seriously discussing moving (permanently) to another host between now and then.

Let me know if you find a comparable place and I'll do the same.

[MikeNoLastName]

Just got an e-mail back from our provider and now they say we won't even be eligible for credit under their 100% UPTIME GUARANTEE policy which is supposed to refund 100% for this long of a failure. their guarantee page (at least not currently, but after my last e-mail they may be changing it, so you better print it off for your attorney if you decide to stay ;) says nothing about "scheduled" downtime being exempted. Sounds to me like a class-action suit waiting to happen.

We will be moving to another host before Aug.

[Wibfision]

In the event my site was down about 5 hours and it has not affected google referrals.