How much server outage will a search engine tolerate?

[Asia_Expat]

Two months ago, I moved host and server because of repeated downtimes. I thought my problems were over, but yesterday my server went down (actually, I think the server is fine but there is a problem in the rack). I'm getting a very poor response from my host and no feedback.
It's now been down for 18 hours and I see no sign of it coming back up.

Not only is this making me look incompetent to my growing user base (when they look back at the previous issues), I'm concerned about organic traffic. How long can a server be down before it will have a significant effect

[edited by: Asia_Expat at 1:35 am (utc) on May 28, 2008]

[caveman]

I've seen sites down 2 or 3 days without damage. Plus these days crawl patterns are extended and often it's days between bots hitting key pages.

Don't forget too that the more inbound links you have the more ways the bots have to keep encountering you. One of the many reasons why diversity, depth and breadth of links is good. I assume that what the bots encounter also plays a role, meaning that error messages are less damaging than, for example 404/410 or redirect responses, etc.

People can panic when sites go down, understandably, but in my experience, what you are going through is more a matter of lost users than lost rankings.

All that said, I've been through enough pain on this front that "discount hosting" is no longer a positive term to me. ;-)

[Asia_Expat]

Indeed and this is why I am so angry... I went with a premium host in Singapore and a dedicated box that costs me a fair bit of money... but they're clearly amateurs. I called them late in the afternoon yesterday but no feedback after a couple of hours. I tried again in the evening and it diverted to a cellphone, answered by a drunk guy in a bar. Thereafter, no response until this morning. Now a guy just apologising and making excuses.
Looks like I'll be moving again.

[topr8]

my main site was down for almost 7 days due to a major upgrade that didn't go to schedule!

the server wasn't down as such but i was serving custom 404's for all pages.

the cached page in google showed the custom 404 message after a couple of days, and then within three days of it serving proper pages the cached page (sitewide) was showing the updated page. the ranking stayed the same even while the 404 was being served.

[with reference to caveman's comments - i concur that the downtime is a loss of visitors issue rather than a loss of ranking issue, this for a large site that has been in the index 10 years]