The situation: I’m helping a friend update his website that is currently hosted by HIBU. He paid hibu to create and host and now has no access to the site except through update requests. I’m planning to rebuild his site on concrete and would like to move his domain to a new host provider. Because this is a business site I don’t want any downtime for the site.

The assumptions: I don’t think I’ll be able to transfer the files from HIBU to host the current site on my host provider while I'm building the new one. Since I need to build concrete on the web (I need to right?) I can’t just redirect the URL to the new sites IP when I’m done building.

The solution: I’m thinking that I should just get a new domain, set it up on the new host provider, build the site on the new domain, transfer the old domain to my new provider, move the site from new domain to old domain ( I want to keep all the SEO stuff intact) and then set up redirect from the new domain to the old domain.

My Questions: Will that work? Will I actually keep the SEO stuff intact? Is there an easier way to do this?