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Sorry if this is a very basic or repetitive question.

I have a rather well indexed WordPress site whit a few loyal users. I am fed up with my current hosting service and their pricing system, so I got myself a small VPS and I have setup everything there and the only step left is to change the DNS of my domain, which will take like 1 hour to be effective.

the WordPress is installed on the root of my domain "www.example.com" and it will be the same on the new VPS, so the links would not change (everything will remain the same). I am worried that this transfer would affect my site's google indexing.

I would like to know what will I lose, and if possible how to prevent any lost value?

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    It can take a while for the DNS records to propagate throughout the Internet. Often this can be immediate (for some DNS servers) to as much as 72 hours. If both sites are the same, it will be completely transparent to everyone including search engines. In other words, no loss assuming everything goes as planned. Cheers!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jan 31, 2016 at 17:30
  • @closetnoc thanks! maybe you can write your comment as answer!
    – Dumbo
    Commented Jan 31, 2016 at 17:35
  • I am liking the answer from @Stephan below. He does bring up some good points that should help future users. Assuming that your web host is a quality one, there should be no negative effect. Cheers!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jan 31, 2016 at 17:44

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You don't have anything to worry about. Migrations incur risk when:

  1. You're changing the domain name
  2. You're changing the protocol (i.e. HTTP to HTTPS)
  3. You're changing the URLs of any pages, as you'd then need to put some 301 redirects in place.

As none of these seem to apply to you, all that's really changing is your site's IP address. That can only matter if:

  1. The new IP address is in a bad neighbourhood. This is unlikely if you're going with a reputable hosting provider.
  2. Your site was formally hosted in your target country, and is now being hosted far away from it. This is not really a major ranking factor either, but it might have an impact on site speed, which may in turn impact rankings. To pick an extreme example, if I had a .co.uk site, aimed at the UK market, and hosted in the UK, and I then moved it to a really cheap, slow web host based in New Zealand, there probably would be an impact on user experience, and Google may take note of that.

These are extreme examples and it doesn't sound like they apply to you at all. So you're good to go, really.

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    The whole ccTLD being hosted further away can have an effect for latency, however, as a further example, one trend is to host China (locale focused sites) in the U.S. The reason for this was for performance and ranking. So sometimes distance does help and is rewarded. Not that I do not take your point which is an excellent one.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jan 31, 2016 at 17:42
  • Thanks! any ideas how to figure out if new IP is bad or not? I will start researching about this factor....didn't think about it until now!
    – Dumbo
    Commented Jan 31, 2016 at 17:54
  • ok I checked with mxtoolbox.com ...seems to be fine!
    – Dumbo
    Commented Jan 31, 2016 at 18:03

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