If you don't have access to the .htaccess file you can use WP plugins to set up 301s, e.g. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

Routing all blog traffic through your VPS is a bad idea, IMHO. Your VPS becomes a single point of failure for your blog - if it stops working all of your posts are unavailable, not just the ones that require 301s.