hey again, i am back with more, possibly nooby questions. I know that when a server goes down it can hurt ranking a lot, but how long does it have to be down for it to have any effect?? If you are down for a couple hours then will this be noticed? or is it just if you happen to miss a crawl?? p.s. the hosting company is 1and1.com, seems ok, but i don't know what it up right now.
Google isn't an uptime monitor so it's probably (only Google knows) based on two things: 1. Indeed the spider finding the problem 2. Google sending traffic to you via SERPs and noticing they come back within seconds to try the next result = bad experience with your site = potential repercussions mid-long term
it depends how many times they(SE's) are crawling your site. If the downtime is just between 2 crawling moments, then it would not hurt it.
I use 1 and 1...not the best but I never had problems with them....try your best not to let your site go down..with 1 and 1 its usually because of a billing issue....