Hello, I have this hosting from Globat.com, which is down almost every day nowadays, and the total downtime is sometimes more than 2 days a month. It costs me a lot in Adsense earnings and getting links and in terms of dedicated users, etc. but my question now is different: For the first time, the sites also started to give "a 404 not found error" for the last few hours now. Is this really bad for Google? When Google crawlers see this, will they think the site was dropped or something and decrease my rankings? Also, independent of this, my extreme downtime will probably affect my rankings negatively, right? Or would the downtime have to be really huge for that to happen (This is already huge, maybe one of the highest in hosting industry, but not at least like 50% or anything like that). Also, there is another thread about Globat from months ago here, if you are interested: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=716940
I used to host my site at a cheap hosting company. $11 per year. I have once on top for my main keyword and I was earning good money. But then I started to see many host down times. Because of this down time, my site rank in search results started to decrease. I then decided to change my hosting company. While changing the host, my site was down for 48+ hours. This cost me, lose all my ranking. Now after 3 months, I am still on the last page of search results instead of first position.
Web Hosting companies these days don't seem to understand how important it is not to have any or minimum downtime. Sure there are going to be times when there are power outages or maintenance of the servers, but for 48 hours is totally ridiculous. I suggest to people who suffer this much downtime to backup their files and change hosts.