Hi, Dreamhost are doing a big server move today its got to be done i guess. Question is, will this 8hrs of downtime cause any of my sites to lose their rank in the search? Some of my sites are position 1 -- with the cool sub links under them. I'd hate to lose this. I think dreamhost is amazing for the money -- but a sub question here - how much would it cost to get the same features/specs as dreamhost on a site that guarantees 99.999% uptime??? Thanks again.
Wow 8 hours of down time is not acceptable.. lol Especially in this day and age.. As for a host it all depends on what your looking for... Dreamhost is an overseller so I recommend going with hosts that arent.. check out webhostingtalk.com you can find tons of great hosting related info there
I have no precise info - but see that even Google ( adsense ) is downb several hours for maintenance and errors on a weekly basis. hence I dont belief that there is any problem. specially because during real downtime there is NO 404 for missing page, NO 500 for server error - just NO server response and G should be able to handle such. a few hours ( 8 in ur case ) still is within 99,9% most hosts offer 8hr=0.09132420091324200913% downtime equals=99,9% UPtime to move UP from that uptime to 99,999 is nearly impossible because the datacenter is but one of many possible downtime factors. hackers misconfiguration on your side tornado's an dother disasters are other factors that no one can assure - no matter the price. if you would have your OWN dedicated server, then you could do a server move with zero downtime if needed. a normal server change always is possible with 0 downtime if needed. my last move from vps to root server had 0 dt in 2006. my own root server had a few minutes downtime during the past year - all caused by ME. I think there is nothing to worry for you. btw re ur "with the cool sub links under them" I have lots (dozens) of #1 serps in G - but none give the nice sublinks any secret to get the sublinks in addition to being #1 ?? a particular structure of your site or so ??
in the period of these 8 hours, I think all pages, that google bot is gonna crawl in this period, will be marked as URL not found and google will use the previous cache of these pages. It is possible that u dont loose any ranking. I suggest u buy hosting at hostgator or any other. I once had same host problem, in total my site was down for 2 days, I lost all my ranking in google, I then moved 1 site to godaddy, and other to hostgator