Search Engine Ranking and hosting

[GaryBradshaw]

I am not sure where to post this...sorry if it in the wrong place. I also could not find much on the subject when searching...

I am thinking about changing hosting companies but am nervous because I rank very well in the search engines. I have been with my current host for 4 years.

There are so many issues to consider when changing a host and I am wondering if there are search engine issues that I need to consider?

Where can I go to research this issue? Any thoughts?

Thank you all so much.

Gary

[SEOMike]

As long as the site doesn't change you should be ok. My advice is to keep a redundant copy of your site up until the DNS switch is completely handled. In other words, don't cancel your current service until you're sure the DNS change has propagated... give it a few days. Put the site on the new host and leave it on the old one. That way it doesn't matter if someone's DNS has updated or not they will find the site and so will the search engines. There are other things you can do if you are moving to a shared box. You can go to the extreme and find out how many sites are on the box and see if any of them could potentially get the box's IP in trouble, but you won't know the box you get until you are already at the host. After that it can be hard to get them to move you to another box if there's only "potential" for a problem.

[edited by: SEOMike at 3:59 pm (utc) on Nov. 14, 2007]