I have a site that used to host on a free hosting service. A few years ago, I've moved it to a new location (paid hosting, new domain).
Now the standard way of forwarding to the new address would be to send a "301 Moved Permanently" status code on the old site. However, the hosting service requires me to show their banner on the page (if the banner doesn't receive certain amount of views monthly, the site is considered either dead or not following the rules, thereforethe account gets deleted).
As I don't want to break any rules of the hosting conditions, I'd like to know if there's any other way to tell web crawlers my site has moved? (The old site is still pretty high up in the web search results since it was linked a lot.)
Have the old domain hosted on your new host, send the 301 from there. If you can't, talk to your DNS host and see of they can do it for you.
There are no real alternatives to a 301 redirect.