New domain name

Hi all,

I currently have a forum at example.forumotion.com and would like to purchase example.com. There are some questions I would like to ask.

1) What is the difference between buying from forumotion and buying from a third party, say domain.com? Are there any perks buying from forumotion?

2) If I were to redirect example.forumotion.com to example.com, will I lose the SEO equity with the search engines (and pagerank) that I have built over the years with example.forumotion.com

3) Understand that forumotion auto assigns a URL for each new topic. Just wonder if there is any way I could decide my own URLs (for SEO purposes)

Thanks in advance for the help.

1. You get 10 emails address from Forumotion.
2. I'm not sure
3. Nope, option is buying from Forumotion.