I have about 7 current clients and many in the past, where their PageRank was stuck at a low rank.  They had nice sites that should have been ranked higher.  All changes, additions, tweaking to content did nothing to improve the website’s position.

The common thread – they host their site on an internal server.

Hosting internally is becoming one of the major hurdles in obtaining any reasonable Page Rank.  I don’t have any hard answers why, I suspect it could a number of issues; connectivity, ports, hops, network issues, security, firewalls.  I would strongly suggest moving the public domain to a hosting farm; you can keep the corporate programs/services in-house.  I would actually go so far as to say, it would be a huge waste of time and money working on SEO until the site is moved, because there is NO guarantee that any changes or additional content will get rid Google’s concerns.

As a business owner, remember a website is about communication and marketing, it should be treated like a marketing project, not a technical program.

As an I.T. professional you should remember that the website is a hassle and has nothing to do with your core tasks, let the website go, remembering that the site is a target for hackers, so why worry about your network attacks because you have some open ports or vulnerable services running.

As for cost, hosting is a commodity, you can host for less than $20 a month just about anywhere.  Having a server, network, programs, and time to manage an internal server is $1000’s of dollars a year.  There is no tangible benefit to hosting your self if you are reading this post.