I currently have several instances of WP running on Hostgator. As MU won't work from a subfolder on HG, I have decided to sign up for a second Hostgator account so I can start from scratch, building the MU site in the root and migrating the blogs in at my own pace. Once the new site is built, I was planning to simply point my domain at the new account.. et voila.
I was planning to edit my hosts file so that I see the 'new' site - to avoid having to change URLs in the database later.
Just wondering if this is the best approach, and if there is anything else I should be aware of?