upgrade from name-based to IP based?

[loki]

a client is experiencing all sorts of problems with their intranet/emails. BT cannot help, their tech support cannot help, etc.

one suggestion is we change the IP number of their website(i don't see it as logical, neither do they really, but they're running out of ideas!).

currently they are on a shared server (name-based) and my hosting co. can quickly and easily upgrade their site to a fixed IP address.

any thoughts as to the knockon effects to their rankings?

ps FWIW they are a .co.uk domain on a US based server.

[Florence]

I don't understand why anyones suggesting that changing their website to a different IP will have any effect on their mail?

Mail and domain pointing are seperate things entirely. The mail problem would be unconnected to the webhost unless they've setup the mx entries wrong or you use their mailserver and it's not working properly.

But the answer to the question is that changing the IP (DNS entry) will make no noticable difference to human or robot visitors to your site but because of caching across the www the entry can take up to 72 hours to update - therefore if the site is actually being moved to another server you should make sure it physically exists on both the old server and the new for at least that period after the change is made (so that any server with the old dns on record won't get a blank page if it goes straight there without checking the dns records first)

If all they're doing is adding a dedicated IP then you don't even need to worry about that.

[loki]

agree with you on part one but things are ridiculously desperate!

and we're studying just changing to an IP based address, not touching the nameservers.

thanks