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

>> CUTTS: 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 Pearl.
It could be running PHP. It could be running Python. It could be running Ruby on Rails.
All we know is where 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, you know. And all we know is what the web server sends back. So, you know, having
your web site 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's 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's in Germany and I move the website to Google's
App Engine or Amazon S3. Does this harm my listings for German results?" Well typically,
your main site will still be the--your server will often be still in Germany. For example,
Amazon S3, you can serve up static files, and so, you can 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 every thing 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 Webmaster console to Germany?" That is the sort of option you can use. So
even if you have a U.S. 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
in that way, even if you're locating yourself at the Cloud, we'll know that it's still relevant
to that particular country. In general, I've noticed that when everything is on the Cloud
you don't have to worry about patching your software 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 times, it can
be less trouble. And the 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, and 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.