Webuser Forums: What should I do?

I've just done the very thing you are asking although I completely redesigned the entire site as well (100+ pages). I moved from free to paid hosting and to a new domain. Firstly I found a good registrar where you have full control over the domain regarding pointing and redirection. Incl.vat it works out at £7.05 total for two years for a uk domain name: http://www.telivo.com

I've left my original site where it is for now with an announcement of the new site with a link to it. I have emailed all the webmasters who link to the site to ask them to change the url and also emailed all visitors who had posted in my guestbook or had emailed me privately. (I did each one as a separate email to avoid it getting thrown out by anti-spam programs) I resubmitted the site on the new url to Google and DMOZ? (I forget the correct doodah) with a note telling them it is a change of url.

I also kept as close as possible to the original url, i.e. it was http://www.aquamoonlight.uku.co.uk
and is now:
http://www.aquamoonlight.co.uk

so the webmasters only have to remove the uku part of the original.

The original site gets about 30,000 visitors a month, so doing all this was very important and although it was time-consuming, it is worth it. Some of the webmasters have changed their links already and yet I only notified them this morning.

You only have one chance in life - take it while you can

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