Has anyone else experienced Google penalty for site crashing? I'm curious has to how long my SEO will be affected…? I was around 20 to 25,000 unique a day and then something went viral on Facebook and my dedicated hosting couldn't handle the 200,000+ unique visitors and was practically down for a solid 2 days while I tried to switch hosting providers as fast as possible… Which is another question… Will switching hosting providers to a better host be read as a red flag by Google and will this too hurt?
When the site is serving error pages (line HTTP 500 errors) then Google sometimes removes it from the SERP, but when you are back online and serving content properly you will comeback. There should not be a long-term effect from this. Moving to another hosting provider is no problem at all. Move site, make sure it's configured the same and then update DNS.
Are you sure that's the only problem your website has? My site went offline for a week and I never saw a drop in rankings and it was still listed in Google's serps.
Well I received a message in my Google webmaster tools and unless it was just a huge coincidence my Google traffic dropped off the map the exact day my website went down for a few days… I don't know.
Your google traffic was down because your site was down, if your site does not load your analytics will not be tracked, I highly recommend using cloudflare or another cdn network for these situations. It helps with your server resources.