Forum

[tyuqte]

Can changing hosting provider negatively affect one's SERP's?

Sometimes it may take 2-5 hours for a DNS change to take effect, which means a site (it's domain) would be temporarily down for that time, could that make you look bad in Google if they happen to be spidering your site then?

 

[esolutions]

Hi,

Yes, it can happen that Google and/or others will be spidering your site when it's down, which is why it's better to get a host that will do the transfer for you in the fastest time possible.

Use Google Webmaster Tools for your site and it will show any detected broken links or 404 page not found errors (which will occur if the site is down while the spidering is going on). Good news, once your site is back up and running, respidering will fix any issues.

Think of this as long term.

 

[essexboyracer]

If you are changing hosting provider for your website, in theory the change would be seemless. You make the change and depending on the TTL (time to live) set in the DNS records, some DNS servers will point toward old hosting, some to the new. This isn't normally a problem but if you are running something like a forum which can get updated in between the change, you may want to put up the maintenance page whilst you move the site.

I don't think changing a host would effect SERPS, google ranks domain names not IP addresses or locations of hosting providers, although a host that is close to your target market will decrease page load