Will change in hosting effect rankings?

Will it affect my rankings if i switch to a vps from shared? Switching within Uk to uk based VPS.

Also is this a simple task. Need to ask my web guy to do it but he always comes back with $250 regardless of whatever i ask...dick! obviously never pay it but like to know how much work is involved with eCommerce site with 300 pages.

Cheers

shameless bump...anyone?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w41dsE87CfY

Short answer, no.

bhlon said:

Will it affect my rankings if i switch to a vps from shared? Switching within Uk to uk based VPS.

Also is this a simple task. Need to ask my web guy to do it but he always comes back with $250 regardless of whatever i ask...dick! obviously never pay it but like to know how much work is involved with eCommerce site with 300 pages.

Cheers

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Since it's both UK and if you're probably targeting UK largely the answer is NO. It shouldn't. However if that site migration will be included with say hours of downtime, then yes. It will affect your rankings especially if SE bots see that your website is down.

I suggest check with your registrar how fast they can update NS on your domain. Then have every file ready and changing NS should be the last thing to do.

To the people saying "no", this is actually incorrect in some instances. Also, listening to Matt Cutts, not a good idea. You are trying to game Matt Cutts, not follow his pipery. As for hosting effecting your rankings, this depends very much on the situation, if you are hosting on a grid service, you can end up in a bad neighborhood and it can have a lot of negative impact. Look up CloudFlare's research on this (Google "CloudFlare SEO") as they provide complex hosting and had initial issues with their clients' rankings.

JM100988 said:

To the people saying "no", this is actually incorrect in some instances. Also, listening to Matt Cutts, not a good idea. You are trying to game Matt Cutts, not follow his pipery. As for hosting effecting your rankings, this depends very much on the situation, if you are hosting on a grid service, you can end up in a bad neighborhood and it can have a lot of negative impact. Look up CloudFlare's research on this (Google "CloudFlare SEO") as they provide complex hosting and had initial issues with their clients' rankings.

Click to expand...

While I take everything that Matt Cutts says with a grain of salt and believe that he lies to us anytime it suits his purpose in this case there is really nothing for him to gain from being deceptive on this subject. There is no "gaming" involved in moving to a different or better hosting company. This is a normal action taken by website owners all the time that have no idea what gaming the system even is in this case.

While there is always the chance that you can end up in a "bad neighbor" when moving the easy way to watch out for that is host from a reputable company. I have moved sites 100's of times and never have I had any kind of ranking issue because of it.

As far a the downtime issue mentioned earlier the easy fix for that is just to leave your site up in its old location for a week after the move. That way it is in both places during the changeover and there will be no loss of traffic. One thing you should do however is set a forward on all your email accounts at the old location so you do not lose any emails during the transition.

I don't think it will have much effect. I have actually heard that site speed does play q part in ranking (albeit a very small part), I'm assuming vps should be faster, or at least more stable than shared...?

Yea, site speed plays a role in ranking and has for a little while, also massively impacts conversion rate (as seen in leaked Amazon research circa 2006 - not 100% on that date). The only three real "hosting" related issues that can affect your rank are site speed, content delivery, and IP. Whenever you change any of those you risk taking a dip, but, most of the time, you should be fine.

Don't worry, he's not charging it. Thats his response to anything and everything "erm...it will cost $250"

if your seo is pretty solid then it will barely have any effect. Whatever the change is, you can always get it back.