My hosting has downed for 6 hours, could my site decrease rankings?

I don't know if my site rankings could be affected or not when my web hosting has been downed for 6 hours for any reasons.
what should I do now when my site gets back?

What has happened to me in the past was my position was temporarily deleted for a few days but came back after I switched hosting providers.

The website in question was down for a solid 4 days though. I suggested to think about switching providers if their support is slow.

Downtime is a bad thing. When the spiders attempt to index your site, they will receive a error. Google does not want to send people to sites that won't load so it will decrease your ranking, or even de-list your site.

Now, I don't think this will happen in 6 hours. Google, even with their vast infrastructure has also experienced outages. If the downtime goes on too long, or starts happening more often, then you could have some serious raking problems.

Always make sure you have backups of your site! If your host provides daily offsite backups, that's great, but don't rely on this alone. Have your own backups also! That way, if something goes wrong and you decide to switch providers, you can be back online quickly.

mikemartel said:

I don't know if my site rankings could be affected or not when my web hosting has been downed for 6 hours for any reasons.
what should I do now when my site gets back?

Click to expand...

In the grand scheme of things 6 hours is nothing.. chances are Google bot did not even visit your site... If you have Google WMT set-up then you will receive an email notification when Google bot is unable to visit and crawl your site... Google for sure knows websites go down and hence its not something to worry about, provided it is not too frequent... Google bot even retries usually within 24-48 hours... You can also request Google bot to visit your site via WMT using the fetch feature as outlined here should you really be concerned.

As Inquestor mentioned - I would seriously consider moving to new provider... At the end of the day an unreliable, poor performing webhost will have an impact on your rankings... The occasional blip can be expected with any webhost and a few hours on shared hosting is not a big deal, especially if the issue relates to server updates etc