Moving to New Hosting Company

Will have to change my IP Address to move to new host. Danger?

[nzap]

Hi, I would really like to change my hosting company. But I have high google ranking on major keywords for my industry and have been with this hosting company for 5+ years.

My concern is that since my dedicated IP Address will change if I move to a new hosting company, will this effect my Google Rankings, PR, or anything thing else?

I have heard that Google does effect weight and significance to IP Address.

Help! What can I do? Should I just remain with my old hosting company who is doing a decent job, but does not have the tech support that I expect (which I can get from my new hosting company)?

A drop in our rankings could mean $$10,000+ losses per month.

[tedster]

You seem to be talking about a dedicated IP address. I have moved many domains to different hosts with different IP addresses and never had a glitch. The only, very occasional, bugs I have ever seen in recent years have involved shared IP addresses over many, many domains.

[nzap]

That's interesting tedster. I have had people tell me that moving a website that has been on a dedicated IP address over to a new dedicated IP address can effect your rankings for at least several weeks. I have heard it is temporary, but that it can effect rankings.

You are saying this is not correct, right?

[Quadrille]

Right.

Changing hosts could have a marginal, brief effect if either the old or new host is incompetent. And that's it.

SEs don't care about hosts, they care about URLs. If the host does what you are paying for, the SEs will have no quarrel.

[nzap]

Quadrille,

A brief interval could mean a lot of money to us ... $10,000+ for a few weeks potentially, so we don't want to move even if there is a brief outage.

When you say if the old or new host are incompetent, in what way do you mean it?

The new host seems very competent, to me anyway, which is why we want to move. But our old host ... I'm just not sure about -- although without moving, we have excellent ranking and are afraid of jeopordizing it.

Any thoughts?

[Quadrille]

Sorry.

When I say brief, I'm talking about the 'new' site propogating across the web.

I'm talking minimal disruption for a maximum of about 48 hours - only increased if your site falls down a hole between two hosts. If the 'new' host is OK, I can see zero reason for more than a hiccup - or no problems at all.

Talk to your new host about 'worst case scenarios' - I'd be surprised if there is one! ;)

[nzap]

Interesting. Thank you. It's just that people had told me in the past that it could lose some ranking for a few weeks. It seems that most people I talking to on webmasterworld do not believe that to be the case.

I thought google attributed more weight to IP addresses. But perhaps not.

[larryhatch]

I moved my whole site once, old host also hosted spam accounts.
I left up the old hosting while the new one propagated.
Once the newie was up 100% I closed down the old one.
I've had other troubles, but this worked smoothly. -Larry

[Quadrille]

I thought google attributed more weight to IP addresses. But perhaps not.

I think that started when Google got registrar rights; some thought this meant Google looking through their bedroom windows. That appears not to have happened ;)

The one time that IP addresses do matter is when moving from a host in one country to another country. Google's country-specific searches do seem to take account of site origin, as well as domain.suffix

But host-to-host within a country does not seem to matter at all.

Do report back on your experience, please :)

[texasville]

>>>>Help! What can I do? Should I just remain with my old hosting company who is doing a decent job, but does not have the tech support that I expect (which I can get from my new hosting company)? <<<<

You really need to ask yourself if it is worth a gamble. If it's just tech support, keep in mind, that changes.
I have a site that is hosted by a service that was great. But it changed hands and now tech support is the worst. But I have resisted, til now, changing hosts because their uptime has always been near-perfect.
But in the last month it has gone down twice. And according to google sitemaps it happened when google was trying to spider the site. Twice. In a row. So I am looking around for a new host now.

[nzap]

texasville,

I appreciate your reply. I think that closely resembles my thoughts on the topic also. It is actually not worth the gamble for me, so I think that at least for now, I will be sticking with my current host.

Thanks, you've confirmed my thoughts.

[McClaw]

I have moved Hosts several times in the last 5 years, and I have never been affected, not even for a day.

In some cases my site has moved from one country to another without being affected.

As long as you keep the old site online while you set up and test the new site, and wait for the DNS entries to propagate, you should'nt have any problems.

Make sure all you 301 redirects (From the past) are in place on the new server before doing the DNS change, thats VERY Important!

[ontrack]

Does anyone know how google feels about godaddy or networksolutions ips. I've heard they don't do as well in the rankings, if so would this only be for shared ips?

[CainIV]

When you move to a new host and point the new nameservers to the url, then leave the old hosted pages live at the other domain for about a week (preferrably two). This usually fixes further problems that can happen with indexing and moved pages.

[bb_paul]

matt cutts has written an entry in his blog exactly about this....very useful...i can't give a direct link to it here, but search google for "known seo issues of changing host" and it's the first result.

:)

[andye]

One solution is to keep the site running at both IP addresses - i.e. have an identical copy on both machines.

If that's not possible then at least put a redirect on the old machine.

The reason: the DNS changes will take time to propagate across the net. There will be a period of time where some users/spiders have the old IP address, and some have the new one. So you need to provide some meaningful content (even if it's just a redirect) on both.

So for example:

If your domain name is widgets.com and you're currently on 1.2.3.4, and you're moving to 5.6.7.8, then you could set up 1.2.3.4/index so as a redirect to 5.6.7.8/index, and set up *both* web servers to serve requests for widgets.com.

Then make the DNS change, so that widgets.com moves stops resolving to 1.2.3.4 and changes to 5.6.7.8. This change will take some time to propagate, so for a while (how long depends on your DNS settings), you might have users visiting *either* 1.2.3.4 *or* 5.6.7.8 when they type in widgets.com.

Something else you can do that'll help: some time *before* you make the move, change your DNS settings (TTL and so on) so that your domain name will be only cached by DNS servers for a shorter period of time than usual. That way, when you do make the move, your DNS change should take effect more quickly. Then after you've made the move successfully, change your DNS settings back to normal, to ease the load on your nameserver.

HTH, a.

[gabidi]

We've had top ranks for most of our industries keywords for the past 6 months. Site is about 3 years old.
We moved to a new dedicated server (old and new server in the US) two weeks ago. At first everything was great , even new pages got indexed next day! Starting 2 days ago we completely disappeared out of ranking for 80% of keywords!
Site:<oururl> shows all pages indexed, PR is still 6 , just nothing shows in search result.

I don't know if this is a result of the june 27th update or the move, either way we will find out soon i guess. I'm hoping it's just a bad data push/glitch, it just really hurts looking at the Google analytic traffic curve's nose dive, scared my heart will follow soon .lol.