Just wanted to share my experience. I have several websites which are indexed on Google. I use two different hosting companies. What is weird is that on one of them, when I add a new website it always takes ages to be indexed ...where as on the other hosting its only like a day or two maximum. I use exactly the same methods to make sure they are indexed (backlings, social networks, forum signatures and many other ways). But on one hosting it takes weeks compared to the other ... The host which works well is french, and the one that is slow is US. I am seriously wondering if the shared sever i have on my US hosting is the cause of all of this ...maybe there are two many spam websites on the server which could explain why... Anyone had similar experiences ?
It could be a bad neighborhood as you said or maybe the host is limiting the spider's access. Which hosting company is that? The famous hosting companies usually don't have problems like that.
I always wondered if the host had any impact regarding SEO, I have many different hosts, two are USA and another runs a UK site. The UK host runs on a more private hosting package through a friend, it does seem to run a lot better in the SE's but that might simply be due to the UK market being lower then the USA market in regards to competition. I'd keep testing, if it still continues to act like this then it's more then likelly your host might not be on Googles good books.
Don't think so, I am not sure as I am of cause not working with/for Google, but I run a SEO service and my own hosting company and offer 3 different server locations (US, UK, Sweden) to chose from for my customers. The pages hosted in UK and Sweden get usually faster indexed than the US. Think it has to do with the pure local amount of indexing requests.
Location of the server plays a role in geographical indexing for sure. Other then that it should not be really problem.