Reason being, text of site will be the same but old system is an out of the box thing and therefore the structure will change - the site may look a little different to google. so should this affect my pagerank and if so will it hurt? it's a business, so can't really afford to lose a lot of traffic. wouldn't mess with it, except old web host going under.

Try to keep the structure the same, if possible. For example, if you had a page at www.example.com/page1.html, keep that page in your new host.

If you can't redirect the old page to the new one. Create an .htaccess file and redirect that page.

At least that way you can preserve your search engine status.

Other things to note when moving hosts:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/mov...