to Change or not to Change our IP address

[fctoma]

Hello,

Management is asking me if it would be ok to have our IP address changed to save $100 a month on our current setup. I told them know, and know its not a good thing. I've been to 5 SES conferences over the last 8 years and no some of the repercussions of changing an IP address on a well established site.

A little about us... we've ranked number 1 for many of our hard-fought, competitive printing software... we've ranked extremely well for years. We have maybe 500 pages, most of them indexed and we do well, very well amongst our competitors’ web sites.

What I am asking for is your thoughts on why it is or isn't bad to change our IP address (the same one we've had for almost 10 years). Please list some "hard core" facts and/or reasons so I can give them a more than "heck no, that would suck!" :)

THANK YOU all of you.

Frank

[wednesday]

You're talking about 10 years old established site, right? Do you think that google evaluates sites by IP? I guess the only thing that can have some impact is regional serach if you change to new country.

[DMC_34]

We did it last year on a 5 year old site. Nothing changed, we still hold our good rankings on Google.

DMC

[fctoma]

I just remember hearing others saying if possible, make that your last stand... keeping your IP address. This came from various panelists from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and so on.

And yes, Google does place relevance on the IP address. There was also another track that I listed to various speakers from Hosting sites like Godaddy. That was one of the reasons they started offering the "static" ip address option when hosting with them, along with other major host providers.

I know it can work with various sites... we've moved a few a year or so ago and had some bad affects early on in the move, but went back to normal. My thing is... I don't want the bad affects early on, especially from Google. Over the last few years, we have received 85% of our traffic from them.

Any other comments are most welcome and I thank the two previous contributors.

[Penaf]

Talking about IPs I always had a question that, I don't know why, didn't ask anyone...

For SEO purpous does it help if your site has it own nameserver addresses like:
ns1.yoursite.com
ns2.yoursite.com ?

[emils]

Here's my take of it.

I own a few tens websites, and over the years, we did change our IP addresses, hosting companies, nameservers etc. on well established sites, LOTS of times already. There was no negative effect whatsoever on any of these sites. The sites are very different in topics, language, construction, popularity, traffic levels etc. and this worked out 100% OK for all of them. I can therefore confirm from our experience that changing your IP should generally be regarded as safe.

You should be careful though on the common issues discussed here on WPW - like avoid sharing ip with others, avoiding downtimes etc. Also make sure your host doesn't mess your setup. I believe this is the biggest risk you may take - if hosting company reps are stupid, they may mess your website setup and sometimes this can ruin months or years of hard work.