I have to move hosts as mine have gone rubbish, I am ranked really well on Google for high traffic search terms and am worried that moving hosts and ip's might mess this up, I have read about that happening before and wondered if it was true or a myth? Thnx
If the new IP is not already blacklisted for excessive spam/scam, i don't think the IP-change itself affects anything if your site had a good ranking before.. but related to backlinks, backlinks hosted on IPs from different networks and countries have a big influence on ranking and country specific ranking.
It's just a myth. Don't take six months with your site down, and don't overlap with dupe content, and you'll be absolutely fine.
Shouldn't really make a big impact, I expect it's just a myth really as long as the transaction between servers is relatively quick.
Yeah, if you put your site up on its new server a month before you take the old one down, Google will see this as duplicate content and not be very fond of the new setup. People have made more confusing schedule errors in the past.