If I move a site from one hosting company to another and still keep the same domain name but have different IP Address, will this affect my rankings at all?
if the new IP is within the same geo, then there will be no problem. you will only see ranking flactuation if you move your hosting form one country to another
it's depends on your country if your domain register from USA ip then you get benefits from US..but not major different ....if your on page and and link popularity is good then doesn't matter....
Make sure you leave your site up on your old ip for a while, in case there are any slow DNS servers that don't update your records for whatever reason. You don't want your site to be recrawled and have everything 404.
Domain and content do count. Your server IP doesn't as long as you manage to switch servers smoothly ie without a downtime. Change the IP records of your domain only AFTER you already set up your page on the new server!
It won't affect your SERPs. But as mjp81 mentioned, be sure to leave the old site up for a few days because your old IP is cached in routers all over the internet. They usually get refreshed within 24 hours, but some people set theirs for longer periods. Just leave the old site up until all the traffic is coming into the new IP.
If during the change of hosting, your site is down for sometime, then your site may lose SERPs ranking. You should try to do this switch as soon as possible. And if your site is targeted towards any specific country/region, then this may affect the ranking if there is any difference in hosting company's location.
i have just made a BIG mistake when moving servers. we have multiple domains pointing to the same site (different pages of the same site). i moved the main domain to the new server and left the old site and old domains on the old server - by mistake. i completely forgot to remove the site from the old server and have been whacked by google and lost most of my rankings. traffic has halved. i can imagine how this looks dodgy to google - multiple domains pointing to the same site on a different server. it looks like i'm mirroring the sites to inflate search listings! don't make that mistake. i still dont know when to expect my rankings to come back up (i rectified the error as soon as the listings dropped 3 days ago).
Well freelistfool, it is not 24 hours, normally it takes 24-72 hours for all DNS server around the world to update your new server location of your website. I was an ISP tech staff so I think I know this issue pretty well.