Hosting company just told us websites will be down for 8 hours!

What effect would this have on search engines?

[TravelSite]

Our hosting partner has just told us that - in less than one months time - they will be taking all the websites offline while they upgrade their power supply.

This has came as a bit of a shock, and is quite short notice for us.

The hosting company has a good hosting centre, probably the best one available that's within close proximity - but as they only have one centre we can't move some of our servers to another location to avoid being down.

What effect would being down for 8 hours (other than lost business) have on our position in the search engines (our various brands currently appear highly across the main search engines and hence get indexed frequently)?

Have any search engines commented on such things?

Thanks

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Based only on opinion, I would not think that any of the major search engines are going to drop you after only eight hours downtime. They know that s**t happens so I am sure that they legislate for this.

[wolfadeus]

I wouldn't worry about Search Engines, but the users might be disturbed - depending on your king of site, I would set-up a mirror and re-direct the domain.

[grandpa]

I've been offline for a weekend at a time with zero negative SE effects. Your's is a valid concern, but in all likelihood you will be OK.

I wish my host would tell me in advance when I was going to be offline! At least you have options now to stay online if you want to, or take the day off and hope they get it right the first time.

[Matt Probert]

I'm shocked you are concerned about search engines, and not your customers. Are you sure you have your priorities right?

Matt

[skipfactor]

What kind of host goes down for 8 hours (intentionally)?

[jdMorgan]

> What kind of host goes down for 8 hours (intentionally)?

A host with no maintenance fail-over plan whatsoever, or one taking the 'easy way out' instead of moving the sites from the affected servers (or facility) to backup servers, changing the routing, doing the upgrade, and then moving the sites back before repeating to upgrade the next batch of servers. They appear to be doing what's fast and cheap for them, without regard to revenue loss by their customers. In fact, this kind of upgrade can be done with at worst only two brief outages per site for database-driven dynamic sites, and at best, seamlessly for static sites.

Jim

[arieng]

Last week, we had some unexpected server overload - about an hour on two seperate occasions causing cgi timeouts for many of our dynamic pages. I didn't think about the effect on SEs, but this morning I checked on some competitive Google SERPS where we rank in the top three.

On two of these SERPs, our page still had the same ranking but the title and description were...

CGI Application Timeout
HTTP/1.1 502 Gateway Error Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Date: (date) Connection: close Content-Length: 186 Content-Type: text/html ...

Perhaps if a page is relatively new, Google might remove the listing. But for a page with a long-standing ranking, they seem to overlook these little blips.

[GaryK]

What kind of host goes down for 8 hours (intentionally)?

Some of the biggest in the industry. One of my hosts moved to a new DC fairly close to the old DC. They shut down the servers and moved them to the new DC. It took more than eight hours for some of us. At least they told us in advance and some of us made plans to deal with it.

[TravelSite]

Thanks for all the feedback - it's been very useful.

I'm shocked you are concerned about search engines, and not your customers. Are you sure you have your priorities right?

Matt, this post is solely about the effects on search engines, we've already looked at the impact on business (e.g. the hosting company has kindly offered to do the upgrade from midnight onwards and not during the day, at our request).

Being concerned with search engines however is part of looking after your customers - who find you by typing in your brand name, your url, or related keyterms, directly into search engines.

Not being listed on a given search engine would be like part of our telephone system going down - it stops our customers from contacting us.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

By sheer coincidence one of my clients contacted me last night. He had a message from his hosting company saying that they had lost their servers and that they would be working on it over the weekend.

They contacted him again yesterday to say that the problem was solved but they had lost all their data due to a "cracked disk" and he would need to upload his website again!

What a shambles! I would have thought that any self respecting hosting company would back their servers up.

Has anyone heard the like?

[centime]

sounds like they backed up, but the back up failed as well, these things happen

[GaryK]

I would have thought that any self respecting hosting company would back their servers up.

It all depends on the type of plan you have doesn't it? My servers are all self-managed so I am responsible for backups. Was your client in a self-managed plan? :)