How long is too long

for a server to be down?

[Visit Thailand]

I know that even a few minutes is too long for a server to be done. But sometimes @@@@ does happen and the server goes down for much longer.

My server has been down in the past for a few hours and there was never a problem with the SE's, ranking, position etc.

Is there though a certain amount of time a server can be down before it does affect your domains SERPS? Any ideas?

[lammert]

You can be down for a number of days at least. Experiences a few weeks ago with a move from a site from one of my servers to another where there was about one week of unexpected downtime involved showed that Google and MSN slowed down spidering considerably within 12 hours after they discovered the server-outage, but they were at full speed again within 24 hours after the site was alive. During the outage the site was down but Apache logged all requests which gave an interesting view of how spiders acted on this. Apache returned a 404 for all site pages during the outage, not a 503 or 500 as sometimes recommended here.

Very interesting was that after about 12 hours downtime, both Google and Microsoft sent a request to the site from a normal browser from an IP registered to them. It seemed that the outage of the site was automatically detected by Googlebot and msnbot and sent to a human evaluator. Googlebot stopped spidering immediately for the next 24 hours after the evaluator had viewed the site, msnbot was considerably slowed down, but continued spidering. Yahoo didn't slow down at all. But this seems to be normal Slurp behaviour. Slurp is still requesting pages I have deleted 5 years ago and which return a 404 since that time.

During the whole outage maybe 5% of the pages fell out of the SERPs and they were recovered during the first successful spider round after the site went life again.

[LifeinAsia]

I disagree- we've experienced drops after being down for even a few hours.

As with most things in life, there is not standard answer- your results will vary depending on any number of variables, such as how many pages you already have indexed, how often the spiders come to visit, etc.

[swa66]

I've seen in the past drop in SERPS during a week or so time due to a few times each half an hour downtime. Reliably being there is important in maintaining your SERP. Similarly being fast is important.

[Visit Thailand]

Thanks to you all for your replies.

Unfortunately having a server on one side of the world and being on the other when you do not run the company that operates the server can cause a few heart palputations from time to time.

I hate it when it is down for just a few minutes but when things are more serious than that, and when there is absolutely nothing you can do except change hosts, which is an extreme move, it can be testing.

[edited by: Visit_Thailand at 10:47 pm (utc) on April 11, 2008]