Hmm, I'd guess that it wouldn't have a positive effect on SERP rankings, but you might also consider to just add a line to your robots.txt to disallow googlebot to access the folder that's goint to be deleted. If you do that a few weeks before the pages should be delisted, and cause no more troubles therefore.
Or setup an 404 redirection that returns a 200 code, but that could trigger a few duplicate content filters.
Always keep your DNS server seperate from you HTTP server, and keep full control of that DNS server, with some little TTL tricks you can switch servers realtime, and have worldwide accessability within 12 to 24 hours, before the bots notice anything.
And even IF they notice, sites can also be down because of technical reasons, like hardware failure or DDOS, so don't worry.
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