: Setting up a personal domain name Possible Duplicate: How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? I'm looking to set up a personal website, but I know very little about

@Sent6035632

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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@Bryan171

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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@Candy875

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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