Hi everyone, Our site ranks with popular terms related to our niche. We have been in business with the same webhost for more than 7 years (XO.com) Now our web host has decided to increase the monthly charges by 100 percent which we find to be a bit too steep for us. We've decided to move to a new webost which offers the same features and is much cheaper. I dont know how true this is but I have heard that that the IP address associated with you site plays a major role with your rankings. Our site has a dedicated IP and if we migrate to shared hosting we will get a totally new IP address. My qustion is this. If you move to a different web host and get another IP address, be it shared or dedicated, will this affect your rankings with the search engines? Is it true that search engines associate backlinks with your IP address?
Changing host will not affect your rankings (provided your new host is not in a totally different country). However if you read some posts on here about hosting a load of people have problems so I wouldn't ever recommend changing hosts if you are happy with your current host and they provide good service. Saving a few hundred dollars in the short term will seem a big mistake if you lose business because of the poor service of a new host. With hosting I always find you get what you pay for........
Actually, I have heard that consistent ip address is a plus in google. However...ive changed hosts about 4 times in the last 2 years and havnt noticed any change.
Though I'm not speaking from experience, I'm going to guess that as long as the majority of your site and it's content remains the same for at least month or two after the move, any change in IP will be pretty much ignored.
Yeah, as long as you keep your content mostly same, SEs will disregard the IP change after a certain time period. If you also do a radical change in content, SEs might think there had been a silent ownership change in your site, which would be a "bad" thing.
hi 3mice, changing your host does not affect your Rankings because search engine don't care about the hosts. but if you change your domain name it will affect your search engine rankings
You can change your hosts. It won't affect your ranking or PR. But if your server down almost all time or your server is very slow, it may affect your ranking. so choose your host wisely.