I will be changing my hosting provider for a website shortly. The new hosting service is based in the same country and uses faster servers which are as reliable as the old host. So, am I right in thinking that changing hosting company will not have an adverse affect on my Google ranking?
I’m not an expert, but I’d say you’re right. I’ve changed hosts with no noticeable difference in Google rankings. I’ve also searched Google Webmaster Tools help, and the only reference I can find is for changing domains, not changing hosts, which seems to suggest that Google isn’t bothered by the latter.
Thanks for the quick reply. I thought that might be the case but was just getting a few doubts before I did the transfer.
The worst that will happen is that your website might be offline (between hosts) just at the time when Google tries to crawl it, and so you might see a temporary dip as a result. If you ensure that you get your site ready on the new host before switching the DNS entry, that should minimise the time it’s offline and minimise any chance of a temporary dip. If it does go down, Google will quickly realise that the site is back up and running and you won’t lose out in the long term.
What you want to do to keep from having any down time, is copy over all of your files to your new host and test it out. Once you are certain it is working properly, than switch your DNS. Keep your old site up and running until your verify that the DNS has completely switched to the new site and it is working properly. Once the DNS has switched and the new site is working as expected then cancel your old hosting service.
Changing hosting company may have temporary effect on your rankings. Once you are done with this, your rankings will bounce back to normal.
Since your new host is fast, that would impact your rankings in a positive way.
I’ve just come across a Google blog post, which has some relevant information near the end. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/01/feeling-lucky-at-pubcon.html