I was told that if I change my server from one to another it would affect my google ranking because the IP address would change, is that correct?
Nopes! As far as I know, it wont affect but try to keep the downtime as low as possible as dcristo have already mentioned.
As long as your downtime is low, you should be fine. It's possible that if you move to a server that has a large number of websites that violate Google's ToS, you may have a problem, but that isn't likely.
Technical issues aside, I've never had trouble with Google when migrating domains to different servers.
no google bans you if you moved servers lol - if that happened, no one would get a new host and most hosts wouldnt shut down for that reason and PR is updated every 3-4 months (or as it used to be) so it doesnt really matter that anything will happen with PR but if you have downtime, it could affect SERPs a bit, i've seen that happen with my forum when i moved, had 24+ hr downtime cuz of the huge database and my slow internet lol good luck
I was wondering the same thing as well ... if a change of IP would negatively effect things. It appears that it does not! Good answers ...
I recently changed from a UK hosted server to a US server and my serps went up on google.com it may just be a coincidence but i think server location can play a part in serps
No, its not a coincidence. You're just seeing the effects of geo-location. Your site is now seen as being in the US, so it performs better in Google.com. You will, however, probably see a drop in your rankings on Google.co.uk in the near future. But back to the topic of the thread, changing your IP address will not damage your rankings. The post on Matt Cutt's blog is good advice and its pretty much repeated in the Google help system. The key is to leave the old hosting service running until the changes in your domain's DNS settings have had time to propagate throughout the Internet (48-72 hours is usually more than enough time). When the time's up, you can shut down the old service and there won't have been any interruption in service. On ecommerce sites, its often a good idea to close the shopping cart system on the old host and make sure all emails on the old host are being forwarded to an email address that is not tied to the same domain - like a gmail or hotmail mailbox.
The only factor that may play part on SEO as far as switching servers are. 1. any downtime you may have, minimize this as much as possible. 2. changing IP's can sometimes throw things off for some search engines, You may get on the same class C IP class as some of the back-links you have.