x10 Premium vs GoDaddy, Questions

[cristov]

I am looking to buying x10 premium but I'm curious about the options I have against x10 vs GoDaddy. Can anyone answer these questions for me? They are important for me to make my decision.

1. x10's 3 year sign up sounds great @$3.95 but do I have to pay the $142 upfront?
2. Is it possible to bill monthly for three years?
3. I would like to have a .me domain for free but x10 doesn't offer that, is it possible for x10 to do this instead of a .com?
4. GoDaddy offers free credits for Adwords, Facebook etc, does X10 offer similar things? I haven't found any.
5. If I do choose x10, could I buy my preferred domain at GoDaddy, and 'transfer' the domain when I sign up for x10? It doesn't look they have an option to do that...its only org net and com.
6. If I choose x10 for hosting, do they offer email associated with my domain? or is this GoDaddy's service responsible for this? Say if I buy from GoDaddy, host with x10 and I want a contact@website.me web address, how would I get one of those? Is that from GoDaddy or x10? I don't know where to go to get that. What I do know if I choose GoDaddy, they offer emails. Does x10?

All I wish to have is;

1. my custom .me domain
2. an email associated with it i.e contact@website.me
3. free credits could be nice
4. some sort of mixture of my preferred domain with GoDaddy (.me) and x10s great hosting, is this possible and how would I do this?

[essellar]

1) The $3.95/month price includes a steep discount for paying up-front. The price is higher on a month-to-month or yearly basis.

2) If you are billed monthly, your rate will be based on the monthly rate, not on the three-year rate.

3) It may be at some point in the future, but becoming a registrar for a top-level domain costs money. At the moment, x10 is a registrar for the .com TLD only.

4) No.

5) You can get your domain (almost) anywhere and point it to your x10Premium account. You don't need to transfer registrars to use the domain elsewhere. That said, GoDaddy has some obnoxious practices that make domain handling and transfers difficult (there seems to be a "small extra fee" associated with every change you want to make -- there's a lot of noise around that issue in the start-up community at the moment). I would steer you towards gandi.net or namecheap.com for your domain instead, even if you wanted to host elsewhere.

6) Your email address would point to wherever you point it on your domain control page. Your hosting account here would come with email, so you would point your mail here (although you could point it to another mail service if you wanted). You should see all of those options on your domain control page, which sets all of the DNS records.

[cristov]

Thank you very much for your speedy response. This has helped me out a lot in making my decision. I have decided to go with namecheap.com because they offer what I've been needing. x10 is a brilliant hosting company for me for the past couple years, offering free hosting however now I'm in the market of buying a hosting service and I just needed to go elsewhere to get my needs met. Thank you very much for responding again. If it weren't for you I would still be having a heart attack over this decision. Thank you so much for referring me to namecheap even if it was against your self/business interest. I very much appreciate you helping me.

[leafypiggy]

Not exactly true on the domain part.

We resell domains from an upstream provider, and offer almost all domains. If you'd like to register your domain elsewhere, you can most definitely transfer it to us.

As for email, email is done via mx records, which can be set by whatever your domain's name servers are set to.