Will switching server hosts affect my search engine rankings?

No, but follow these steps to be 100% safe.

1. Migrate your web site along with all the content and data to the new server.

2. Change the primary domain name’s DNS to point to the new server.

3. Observe the new server log for visits from search engine crawler bots.

4. When you notice that the search engine crawlers are indexing the web site on the new server, it is safe to bring the old one down.

Yes it can make a difference!

If you switch to a slower server you will notice a drop in rankings, so make sure you get a good hosting provder and you should be fine.

In my experience I've moved domains to a bigger and faster server and seen better results,

I'd focus more on user experience than rankings. If you have hosting problems, then make the switch. Put your visitors first above SEO benefits.

I agree with all of these suggestions. You must shift your site only if your existing hosting is having problems in loading speed.

What about a situation where you have a local business, two websites on the same server, both sites stating the same physical address, any potential penalty?

Would changing the server in this situation affect rankings?

I can happen, but not that often from what I have seen. If you move to shared hosting on an unreliable server that has other sites on the same IP address that spam and contain malware, there is a risk your site may be penalised.

But if you shift to one of the big brand hosting companies, you should be pretty safe.

Get a friend to recommend you to Siteground.com. Costs like £8 for a year with the referral link. WordPress with Quick Cache = loading times of less than a second. I have never had the chance to moan. Perfect for my affiliate sites, and you get to choose between EU, UK or USA IP.

Yes changing your server can affect the speed of your website.

Yes, but not in the way mentioned. Speed is one factor but there are basically tiers of providers, no-one will have heard of this here as it is something only the top enterprise architects understand. There are effectively 7 tiers: Tier 7 is SiteGround - your standard mass market host; Tier 5/6 are specialists such as SimpleHelix or WPEngine; Tier 3/4 are the top platform hosts such as Nexcess; Tier 1/2 are what the top enterprise companies use such as Saks or Net-A-Porter.

Tier 7 are more or less useless except for static pages so let's skip those. Tier 5/6 are usually performance driven for marketing purposes. Tier 3/4 are generally the top platform hosts but cost more. Tier 1/2 are the slowest and most expensive, hence why only the top sites use them.

What's the difference, technical ranking and indexing, a Tier 1/2 will rank better than a Tier 3/4 and a Tier 3/4 will rank better than a Tier 5/6. Much better to be sitting next to Saks in first class than JoeBlogsDIYShop in cargo. So on a Tier 5/6 you will get better performance for lower cost, but you will need to put in more business effort (time) to rank compared to a better provider with equivalent page load times. The key is ~1-2s dynamic page loads, for example Nexcess charge $1,500 to $9,000/mth for their Magento clusters.

Actually that is a fantastic analogy we came up with: Tier 7 = Cargo; Tier 5/6 = Economy Class; Tier 3/4 = Business Class; Tier 1/2 = First Class.

That's why eBay, Amazon, and many large retailers can rank pr0 pages top spot on Google, as they combine technical seo with business seo, smes can only rely on business seo to do the same - and it is getting worse with every Google rollout. Long story, but Google make 70% of their revenue via Adwords so when their revenue declines you will see updates which generally affect smes pushing them to Adwords - except Adwords is pretty useless for smes http://concept5.com/google-adwords-destroyer-of-small-business/.

What do we use, Tier 1/2 providers but there are special circumstances behind that. Some rather smart multi-national consultants made Tier 1/2 hosting (slow and expensive) perform at the same cost and performance as Tier 5/6 providers - we saw a test site ranking first page Google next to Hugo Boss, Net-A-Porter, Amazon for the same products with no business seo.

The simple answer is hosting should be 1% of revenue at sme levels, which level of provider comes down to business specifics, but most will choose Tier 7 or Tier 5/6 due to the low cost and time being cheap.

Overall it shouldn't as long as you are changing to a better server or at a minimum equivalent server. Also make sure that you don't change the URLs or anything like that during the transfer as that could mess up your rankings.

It can affect rankings but I am guessing that if you want to move, this is because you have problems with your current host. So if you move from a crap host to a better one then it's very good for the user if the new website is faster loading.

It could affect rankings but it depends on how you plan the move.

I think it does depending on many factors like speed, server ip and location.

Switching servers will not affect your website ranking if your website is up and loading well and there are no down time issues with your new server.