FYI. I use 1and1 shared hosting and this did not work until I added RewriteBase / to .htaccess which looks like the following:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^profile\.php rewrite_name.php [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule .+ - [L]
RewriteRule [A-Za-z0-9_-]+ rewrite_name.php [L]
</IfModule>

Use in good health.