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How to find web hosting that meets my requirements?

I'm looking to set up a personal website, but I know very little about web hosting. Could somebody recommend a (not very expensive) host? What should I look for when choosing a host? Also, I'm rather icky about atriyasen.com because people can't make out if I'm Atriya Sen (which I am) or Atri Yasen! Would you recommend atriya-sen.com? atriya_sen.com? Finally, what about other TLDs like .name?

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  • Try www.dreamhost.com Excellent and easy to understand interface. PS this question doesn't belong on this website, but hope that helps.
    – Marty Wallace
    May 23, 2011 at 7:29
  • This website is for programming questions ONLY then? Sorry about this then. Thanks for the recommendation.
    – Atriya
    May 23, 2011 at 8:20
  • You should let us know what points are important to you. What do you want to do with your personal site? A blog? Just plain HTML? A webshop? A CMS? Does it need to be fast? Does it need to be cheap? Etc. PS. For a domain name I'd never use under_scores as they tend to be obscure when an URL is underlined (which is often the case for URLs).
    – Jeroen
    May 23, 2011 at 11:42
  • It'll be a blog and also will have CMS pages. I might add fancy stuff like animations later. Wordpress seems like a good choice for me. Also, it doesn't really need to be fast (maybe only 1-2 people might be looking at it at the same time) but it does need to be cheap! Thanks for the info about underscores!
    – Velvet Ghost
    May 25, 2011 at 7:25

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You might consider getting both atriya-sen.com and atriyasen.com, and maybe have one redirect to the other? (Though I'm not sure how this affects SEO.) As for hosting, I recommend "Nearly Free Speech".

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  • You're welcome, and good luck!
    – rickumali
    May 25, 2011 at 10:52
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Web hosting is not a very good question to ask here, as there are so many and people have so many different experiences.

To answer your other questions - I would recommend atriya-sen.com. Search engines are good at splitting URLs where the words are common, but in your case the extra hyphen will help them out. If you can get the .com then go for that. .name might be useful in future to reserve it, but not many people are using .name.

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  • I'm certainly considering atriya-sen.com. It seems however that most personal websites are in the form atriyasen.com! Still confused!
    – Velvet Ghost
    May 25, 2011 at 7:22
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Instead of jumping right into a hosting account, it might be better for you to start out with a local development environment using a WAMP package.

WAMP is an acronym for Windows + Apache (web server) + MySQL (database) + PHP (scripting language).

It will give you the experience needed that you can then (in a month or two) use to help you with setting up and running websites under a hosting account.

There is WampDeveloper Pro which I use (not free). Then there is Xampp. And also WampServer. See which one fits your needs.

Would you recommend atriya-sen.com? atriya_sen.com? Finally, what about other TLDs like .name?

Try not to use hyphens. They tend to look amateurish, old (circa 1993), and are used mostly by keyword stuffing spam domains.

Underscores (_) are not allowed in domain names (though there is some confusion about host names).

Stick with .com. It is expected by visitors.

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  • Hi @rightstuff: what is your experience with WampDeveloper Pro? Thanks.
    – Steve
    Jul 31, 2015 at 14:17

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