Can Changing a Sites IP Address Effect SERPS?

I have a site that is ranked well in Google. The problem is the shared server it is on (Godaddy) slows down during peek hours of the day (sometimes 20+ sec page loads!). Currently, the site has a dedicated ip on Godaddy's shared server and gets approx 50k visits a month.

My question is:

If I purchase a virtual dedicated server, my ip address associated with the site will change and I want to know if this could effect the SERP's I have worked so hard for?

I would appreciate any feedback. If you have changed your sites ip and had good rankings, let me know if the ip change affected your SERPS.

Thanks.

 

I changed the hosting for my personal website 3 times by now in 3 years (Romania and US). Nothing changed in SERP's results nor in PR (still PR3) and still growing. So basically, if don't make major changes to your website structure you shouldn't be worried about switching the hosting.

 

Great. Thanks for your comment. Rep added. I will go ahead and move servers and let you know how it goes.

 

mariuscmr is right. Changing IP address will not harm your rankings or PR. Sometimes there may be slight fluctuation in rankings but these will be temporary.

 

i moved my site from us hosting to UK and got better results.(mu site is for uk costumers)

 

Nothing will change in serps UNLESS the new ip is not widely known for beeing spammy.

 

Nope, it should have absolutely no impact on your search results - unless the IP was originally used by some spammy / blacklisted site.

 

Thanks for the reply's. I will keep everyone updated on the outcome. Also, I hope changing the DNS will not have a negative impact. Can anyone comment on this?

 

I moved my site three time in the first year due to growth and the same type of slowing you're experiencing. I went from shared hosting to a virtual server to a dedicated server. There were no negative effects in my SERPs rankings.

Since you're moving to a new IP be sure to keep the old site up in parallel with the new site for a few days. You need to do this because your site's IP is cached in routers all over the internet and it can take up to 72 hours sometimes before they refresh it. Move the DNS so any look ups will find the new IP, but routers that haven't requested a DNS look up yet will find your site via the cached IP.

I usually leave the old site up for about a week and it has worked well for me.

 

While the information on the IP issue is important I think its almost important to note how crappy Godaddy shared hosting is. You may be getting some decent traffic but it should not be killing their servers.

 

Thanks for the reply's. freelistfool great reply. I agree with dbinto as well. Godaddy's server "experts" recommend I move the site to a better company...like Rackspace. I guess Godaddy specializes in spam websites. Has anybody tried out Rackspace's Cloud Sites hosting (Mosso.com)? If so, let me know what you think.

Thanks again everyone.

 

Personally, I have bad experience with changing hosting.
I bought a Godaddy delux hosting package and moved all sites from economic hosting package to it.
One site dropped from PR2 to PR0 after changing, but there is no change in ranking.
One site lost all ranking in Google, because home page dropped from Google index shortly after switching and still doesn't recover.
To be honest, I'm not sure the reason is hosting change, or my sites are penalized, but every thing happened shortly after hosting switch.
So, be careful.

 

I will be careful Mr.Submit. When you changed the hosting, was there any downtime due to the change? Did you keep your sites up on both of the hosting accounts until the new hosting account IP was cached? From what has been said, both of these factors can cause a drop in PR and/or SERPs.

Please let us know if either of these situations occurred in your experience.

 

Downtime was few hours.

Unfortunately, I can't, because I switched from economic to delux package hosted by same Godaddy and stupid Godaddy requires canceling old hosting before you can add the site to new hosting.