Yesterday one of my hosting company's servers crashed and subsequently my website has been offline for over 24 hours. At the moment my site is displaying a default web page as they have not configured the server yet. Will this prolonged downtime cause my website to simply drop out of google, and if so when it comes back online how easy will it be to achieve the previous ranking? Thanks
Google updates itself every so often. I wouldn't worry about your site unless it's down for more than about 72 hours. You should be just fine.
Well that is good to know... I still have about 45 hours. Typical that as soon as I reach my highest ever position my hosting fails.
Even if 72 hours pass, it still might not affect you massively. It shouldn't be too much of a problem, if you're really that worried, move to a temporary server until your current hosting is sorted out, and your site will be fine with no effects at all. I imagine you'll pull through just fine though.
It may affect if we see the experice of many people whose ranking has been down after such incidents.. I found this from Google webmaster blog http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/advanced-website-diagnostics-with.html
It depends whether or not google cached the down version. If you get the site back up quickly, it should not be an issue. If it was cached with the down version, it's hard to say how it will effect it. You shouldn't have much of a problem. It may drop a little, but I think it will come back to the previous ranking.
Hopefully you'll be able to get your site back up before Google crawls it the next time. I also don't think it will hurt your rankings much.
It's not crucial, but if it keeps happening I would swap providers. Been down for 24 hours is totally unacceptable, they clearly haven't got sufficient back up servers to cope with the volume