Changing to a different host question

[Solaron]

I am curious to know how sites are spidered. Does the spider check IP addresses for indexing or do spiders use domain names for indexing? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have had outage problems with my current host and want to change to a more stable server. I just don't want to change hosts (IP Address) if it will affect my rankings severely. Google's shakeup was bad enough for jacking my rankings.

Thanks,

Peter

[minstrel]

I have changed hosts three times and never had any ill effects...

As long as you are just changing hosts and not changing the domain name or page names, you shouldn't notice any effect at all on search engines. Just make sure you keep a copy of your site on the old server until the new/changed DNS information kicks in for the new host - that way spiders and visitors won't even know that anything has changed.