Best way to move webserver location?

about the best way to move a webserver without causing a drop in SERPs etc.

[Spongy]

Hi,

Not sure if this is the correct forum or not...

I am moving my webserver that hosts my company's site from our old offices to our new offices and I'm not sure exactly the best way to do it. I am not really worried about a day or so down-time, so am making plans to do the move over the weekend, changing DNS or friday night and moving the server on a saturday morning.

What I really want to know is the possible effects on our SERPs - can moving the server to a different IP change how the spiders view the site? I have heard people saying that their site has had reduced SERP performance after a webserver move - is there any way to minimise this? or is this just paranoia on my part? My company is at an all time high in terms of SEO and taffic, so I really need to have this server moved without a hitch!

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Spongy!

[lammert]

Are you moving the physical server to a new location, or copying the files to a new server? I expect the first. If you move the physical server, I would change the DNS entries just after you have switched off the servers, not on the day before. DNS entries propagate fast nowadays is my experience. I just one week ago moved my sites to a new IP and within an hour 75% of the traffic was on the new IP already.

You can speed up the process by changing your DNS TTL times to 1800 a few days before the acutal move. This tells visitors and caching DNS servers "This IP is valid for only 30 minutes" and they will request a new IP address after that time has elapsed.

If your server is totally down during the move, there are no negative SERP effects. It happens often that servers aren't available due to network errors and search engines tend to ignore these downtimes.