No you can do exactly the same when switching hosting as well. But when you switch hosting make shure you leave the old site up at the old address until googlebot is no longer visiting, else it will harm your rankings badly.
You can also use mod rewrite to handle the file extensions. take a look at my website
Internet Marketing Consultant | SEO Wales | Google Expert | Search Engine Optimisation Consultancy | Internet Marketing Consultancy | all the pages are displaying as .htm , but in fact they are all php pages using includes. The site was redesigned using php with includes, but they are rewritten to display php as htm so as far as the search engines are concerned there was no change in page urls
