Web Host Change

[travisbickle]

I am thinking of changing my web hoster due to a price increase and my question is this: Has anyone suffered a loss in traffic or search engine ranking due to a change in web host? Are there any hosters out there that the search engines associate with spammers or hackers and thus any web site with that hoster would be unfairly tainted by association?

[lammert]

As long as your new webhost is located in the same country as your current, rankings will stay the same. Moving to a host in another country will increase rankings for searchers from that country, and decrease it for other searchers.

[JKMitchell]

No loss in traffic or rankings but allow time for the move - keep the sites running on both hosts for a while if you can.

Even after I'd moved my main site from one host to another I was getting bot traffic to the old host for several weeks - it seems that Slurp for example doesn't update their records very often. Eventuall, when I was only getting a small number of visits to the old host I closed the site down on the old server.

Just don't start your new host and immediately close the old one down (although I'm sure you have read this elsewhere).

HTH

John

[HemiCharger]

Same here.

Switched web hosting services many times. Never had a problem with page rank or seach engine position loss.

Important is to overlap the move, i.e. leaving the site on both servers for just a day or two (48 hrs.). This way your visitors will not get the "Page Not Found" error becuse the site cannot yet be found. The new DNS settings of your domain take about 24-48 hours to fully propagate across the Internet.

[edited by: HemiCharger at 5:03 pm (utc) on Sep. 15, 2006]