Changing servers anything to watch out for?

[born2run]

Hi I'm moving my server to another company so it will have new IP address.

Is there anything to take care of wrt Google seo? Thanks

[aristotle]

There's an old SEO adage that says that you might get better Google rankings if your server is located in the same country as your main target audience. Might or might not be true.

Another consideration is the speed and performance of the new server compared to the old server, which could conceivably have an effect..

Off hand, those are the only two things that occur to me which you might need to worry about.

[wheel]

Generally you want the old site and the new site running at the same time. starting immediately you need to change your dns setting to tell all the visitors that they shouldn't keep your dns info longer than a few minutes. That reduces the probability of visitors having your old dns information, and allows you to make the change quicker.

Next, fire up the new server and make sure it's working. THen change your DNS settings to point to the new IP.

Very quickly you should find visitors moving to the new site. Monitor the old server until there's no traffic there anymore. ONce that happens you can shut it down.

Last step, after no more traffic to old server, is to boost up the timing on your dns settings again so visitors don't check your dns every minute or so.

If you're planning on just walking the server from one place to another, then the above DNS stuff still applies while you're physically moving machines.

I've done both, with old/new server running and physically moving a server from one location to another. Having both running is definitely nicer as you can get all the hardware and testing done upfront, then just make the final switch all remotely, at your convenience.

If you do all of that, there should be n SEO impact.

[rish3]

Some other things that tend to come up. Not directly related to SEO, but perhaps worth looking over

- Hardcoded hostnames or IP addresses in configuration files that may not apply anymore.

- ssh keys needed for automated backups or other background jobs

- Missing modules for apache, php, etc. It's easy to miss these, and sometimes, things appear to be working, but fail pretty far into the purchase process. For example, many shopping carts depend on the php curl extension, or apache's mod_headers, etc.

- Shutting down the old server and wiping it before some critical piece was moved, copied, archived, etc. Like client certificates for your payment processor, for example. I use that example because they were located in some /etc directory, and easily overlooked when you think you just need /var/www/yourapp and a database dump.

- Filling gaps that your old server provider used to deliver, but your new one does not. I moved one server from a Linode VPS to a dedicated box. Linode provided a lot of things that either weren't present on a bare unmanaged server, or that I just didn't research like alerts on excessive CPU consumption, remote console access, etc. I did close those gaps afterwards, but as an unplanned scramble.

- Performance tuning or other settings on the old server that you may not have carried over to the new server. Apache, mysql, kernel open file limits, apache "bad bot" lists, etc.

[born2run]

Thanks guys for all the useful info. Appreciate it.