I'm using HostGator like many people are. If there is a website (someone else's) marked badly by google for one reason or another on the same server (maybe they look like mass spam, or are linking to bad places, etc), could this effect the way google sees my own websites on that same shared server? Does anyone know FOR SURE?
It would actually be best to get a dedicated IP, if possible. I believe that with Hostgator it would only be a few bucks a month.
That would be my first step, getting a dedicated IP address to keep my business out of unnecessary trouble unless we know for sure what google does to our websites if we host them on a shared account with spammers.
I had similar experiences, I host my site with a budget host, imagine when I found out all those sharing the same IP was porn and HYIP etc, it is not just bad it was horrible, DDOS was so frequent that even though I paid for a year, I jump ship after two weeks. Get an IP from the provider before sign up, check the reverse IP with webhosting.info, see if those around you are ok sites or not.
A lot of the budget hosts are crashing all the time as they have thousands of sites on the same server