If you are quite sure that you can't use mod_alias, mod_rewrite, mod_headers, PHP, or PERL to generate a 301-Moved Permanently redirect server response, then text links and a meta-refresh are indeed your only options. But a meta-refresh is not a redirect, and it will be up to the search engines to 'interpret' what they see as a 'poor man's redirect'.

Yahoo! has documented their handling of meta-refreshes [help.yahoo.com], so their Webmaster Help section is a good place to get oriented.

I would hope for the best and plan for the worst in this situation; Install the links and meta-refresh and move the content as you described, and then begin concentrating on getting the most important inbound links updated; Hope to recover some of the PR/link-pop from the old inbounds, but plan to lose it and concentrate on building new inbounds to replace them. Also plan to leave that meta-refresh in place for several years -- until you can afford to dump the remaining inbounds pointed to the old domain.

If you can get a few powerful incoming links from on-topic pages on relevant domains, you can avoid most of the pain of starting over with building PR and link-popularity. If your ranking is critical to revenue, plan to use PPC ad campaigns to replace the traffic lost because of the move until your new linking campaign reaches fruition.

In the meantime, be assured that you're doing the right thing for a forward-looking, long-term plan; A business can't afford to not own it's own domain name outright (beware of tricky 'private' domain registrations!), and it can't afford to host on a server that can't provide basic functions like redirects, scripting, custom error handling, and a reasonably-secure sendmail system. DNS and hosting should be kept separate, so that a site can be moved in an instant if there are problems with a host. If a site is dynamic, then a plan must be implemented to generate backups and export them to another computer outside the host's network on a daily basis.

Plan for the incompetence or even maliciousness of your host and your DNS services, and you can avoid big problems. (To be fair, what happens most often is that they have business or legal problems, but a worst-case plan handles either of these contingencies -- worse. Considering the recent RegisterFly fiasco, one can see that the line between them may be thin.)

Lastly, join me in telling all who will listen that cheap hosting is very expensive in the long run, and that free hosting is the most expensive of all. I have no interest in or connection to the hosting industry at all, but the tales of woe I see here have led me to this conclusion -- The limitations of cheap/free hosting become serious barriers to success for small and medium businesses that fall for their siren songs.

The good news is that in most cases, breaking free of their limitations results in a small setback, yes, but the subsequent rate of growth has a much larger upside potential. If you're selling something online, you may be losing massive numbers of potential clients simply because they trust "widgets-r-us.com" a lot more than they trust "widgets.some-funny-domain.com". So you gain trust, improve 'branding', and all that.

Good luck!
Jim

Hi Jim,

Thanks very much for the reply, great post, very helpful. Very interesting Yahoo page too.

I'd be interested if anyone else has had similar difficulties with Typepad.com and how they dealt with it.

Thanks,
S