Fernando from Spain is anxious about transferring from one hosting company to another given that he has a pretty big site and so many things could go wrong, though he did mention that the new host is located in the same country. Should he be concerned from an SEO standpoint?

 

According to Matt Cutts, Fernando should not be too worried. The company is only changing its webhost and not its domain name so everything will appear the same. The IP address may change as well but this will have no adverse effects, especially since the new host is in Spain as well. Matt has done several host transfers himself and has encountered no problems whatsoever.

 

His tip is to set the DNS TTL (Time To Live) to something low like five minutes so that caches will be forced to refresh right away. Otherwise, people may keep getting pointed to the old address up to 24 hours after the switch. If everything is set correctly, then the new IP address should be seen right away by both Googlebot and end users. Consider keeping the site live on both hosts while things stabilize as a best practice.