I have an old retail site that gets almost all its traffic from search engines. If I move it to another hosting company (to save money), am I likely to lose traffic or SERP position just because of the change of hosting company?
If you move your site from a 'normal' host to another 'normal' host, you will probably not see any difference. At least I havent (and I moved sites around a lot) two things you can do: * set up two sites on different IPs and change your nameserver so both IPs will get some traffic. When traffic on the first IP stops, remove it. OR * set up a redirect from your first host to the new one. I prefer the first one, no user will ever notice your site has been moved, and so will searchengines. only your IP has changed. good luck - moving sites is still *me not like* work.
Frank has got it right, I move sites alot and have never noticed any real difference. The only possible difference is if you move from a host that is down alot to a host that is up most of the time you might see an increase, or if the other way around a decrease. Option 1 described above is also the best approach, usually it only takes a couple of days before 99%+ of traffic is forwarded to the new host. A good idea is possibly keep the old host for one month just to make sure everything has transferred over to the new DNS information. You will also want to log into your old host via webmail if possible as once your new host takes over the mail old mail can still be delivered to your old host causing you to lose it unless you manually login and check it. Best of luck to you I've actually gotta do this with 20 sites soon as one of my current hosts is down all the FUXX time!!!