Can moving my website to "the cloud" harm my listings?

We have a question from Michael S in Austria.

Michael asks, can moving my website to the cloud harm my listings?

Okay, so first off, let's just cut off the question there and answer that part, which is think about it like this.

We don't know what's happening on the side of your web server, right?

Your web server could be running Perl.

It could be running PHP, it could be running Python, it could be running Ruby on Rails.

All we know is what the web server returns.

So your web server could be running code that would go talk to Amazon's cloud or AppSpot or anywhere else in the cloud.

But we wouldn't even know that we don't even know whether a page is dynamically created or statically created.

And all we know is what the web server sends back.

So having your website in the cloud, all we do is talk to a web server, and we get some information back.

If you're talking to the cloud behind the scenes, there is no way for any search engine or any sort of bot to know about that.

Now let's go on and answer the second part of your question, which is say, my server is in Germany, and I moved the website to Google's App Engine or Amazon s three.

Did this harm my listings for German results?

Well, typically, your main site will still be that your server will often be still in Germany.

For example, Amazon s three, you can serve up static files so you could serve up images.

But most of the time, you'll still have a web server that glues it all together, and that will probably still be located in Germany.

If you do decide to move everything into the cloud.

So, for example, you got a domain and you populated it with something on AppSpot, then in theory, yes, we might see that the IP address is AppSpot, which might be in the United States.

But as you mentioned in the last part of your question, is it enough to set the geographic target in the Google Webmasterconsole to Germany?

That is the sort of option you can use.

So even if you have a US IP address and you're doing a German service, you can say yes, this part of my site or my entire site is really targeted to the German market.

And then that way, even if you're locating yourself in the cloud, we'll know that it's still relevant to that particular country.

In general, I've noticed that whenever things run on the cloud, you don't have to worry about patching yoursoftware as much because the web host or the web server or the web service takes care of it for you.

So a lot of the time it can be less trouble and hard drives on your local computer can crash.

All that sort of stuff can go down if you outsource it to the cloud, a lot of the times it's easier and you don't have to worry about all that sort of uptime, downtime, all that sort of stuff.

So it can be a really good move.

I've seen people try to change their blog and their images so that they have almost nothing left that runs on their own web server.

And if you can do that, sometimes things run a lot smoother.