Google and Downtime

mobillica · 17-07-05

I have a few sites that are three or four years old hosted by valuehost.co.uk. Up until recently their hosting has been fine, but now and then, I often find that my sites are down.

I am reliant on google for my income, and Im worried what this continued sporadic downtime could have on my ranking. If the site is down for a few hours a week I'm wondering how much of an impact would this have on how google treats my sites????

This is a big headache for me as Ive worked my *ss off the last few weeks on my sites only for the valuehost to let me down

As a result I'm thinking of moving servers. Ive looked at webfusion.co.uk (sister site of 123-reg) and they look ok. I just want a reliable service with minimum of downtime. I dont even have any big databases.

Anyone know how google would view this?

morleymouse · 17-07-05

i cant be sure but i suppose it depends on when google visits. if google tries to access your homepage and gets a 404 error, then tries some of the other pages and gets the same obviously it cant be good.

personally dont think that would mateer too much as id presume they would check back either a day or few hours later. but if they kept getting 404's it would make sense to drop/penalise the site, as its of no use to users.

but then again all the above is my guess, not sure how anyone (bar google) could know unless its happened to them

Brendon · 18-07-05

If Gbot sees 404's when it comes calling, it will try again at a later date. Only if it sees repeated 404's will your ranking suffer - and then it can be restoed with stable hosting in place

"the site is down for a few hours a week"

This should make NO difference, providing they DO get to see your site at some point. However, any downtime is bad for a variety of reasons - look into more robust hosting

mobillica · 18-07-05

Thanks for the replies.

Thank god the site is back up now. When there is downtime, even the company website is down... im quickly losing confidence with valuehost.

Is it an easy process to transfer a website?

morleymouse · 18-07-05

yup.

all files etc you should have on your local machine/network anyway

onlything yo uneed to download from server is any databases, if you have PHPmyadmin its easy.

just click export basically, choose whichever really, I prefer CSV or sql, then that just gets put into your new database.