I have had hosting accounts with perhaps 7-8 different hosts over the past 4 years. Among all, my favorite always has been Hostgator. Slowly and slowly, over these years i have been moving my hosting accounts from all other web hosts to Hostgator. Before i knew it, i had 5 separate shared server hosting accounts, all at Hostgator.com

It was going all fine but soon i realized that keeping 5 accounts is not so tidy. And i was paying like $15 a month per account which makes it $75 a month. Surely i could have a lot better single server in that amount of monthly fees. So i decided to get a single bigger and much better server.  I looked throughout Hostgator but could find a thing. There are dedicated server but that would have been a little too much for me. Besides, the hosting fee would have been 300+ bucks with ease. It’s not that i couldn’t have afforded that price but it was just that i didn’t want to. Would have been sheer waste of money!

I have so much trust and faith and confidence in Hostgator’s service and support that i really wanted to stay on with them. But i guess that was not the case. I had to move on and so i searched for the best possibilities. I searched and searched among all the better hosts and finally after all analysis, i selected Servint Web Hosting. Now i have a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with Servint and it’s just in my range. Infact it comes out to be just nearabout the price that i was paying for the five accounts at Hostgator. Anyways, it took me a couple of days to get to know the VPS. It’s not same as share hosting. I used to have a CPanel in shared hosting and here i could actually make a CPanel account for a website as a whole. I can even be a web host myself. It’s so much fun having a VPS of my own. As for performance, it’s mean machine, bigger, better and more efficient. I am just loving the experience and the support staff is even better than previous hosts. So all this while, i have been very busy, moving my site from previous web hosts including Hostgator to Servint VPS. Probably that’s why i haven’t been onto my blog that often in the recent past. Anyways, funny story is that today i was moving my last site from the last account at Hostgator and would have canceled the hosting by evening, when i get this newsletter from Hostgator regarding their launch of VPS hosting. Arggggghhh! I remember the words that came up when i read the mail. I said  “Good morning Hostgator!!! Finally you came out of your hibernation”.

All in curiosity i did check the prices and what all they had to offer. As usual, they kept their promise of offering the best prices in the business with one of the best services in business. However they themselves admitted in the mail that they have been promising a VPS package forever and finally they are out. I guess from my point of view, the damage has already been done. I have moved to Servint with whom i am more than satisfied. There is now, no question of me moving back to Hostgator VPS. But for all of you my friends, who haven’t moved yet, i give you two options:

Servint VPS : Link to their website >> ServInt.

Fantastic servers. High speed and great reliability. Excellent staff with great knowledge and great turnaround time on answering your tickets.

Hostgator VPS : Link to their website >> Hostgator.

Excellent servers. Reliable. Best prices. Lot of hosting packages option. Good chat technicians. Good response from staff.

Having tried both i think i can give a good non-biased judgment on both. I really can’t compare their hosting services. Both seems to be doing excellent. As in hostgator, i have had little downtimes issues and very recently a server overloading issue that caused suspending a site of mine from hosting which caused me monetary loss as well. But they do offer better prices. On other hand ServInt has an excellent staff which really is dedicated in helping you all around. Instead of suspending my sites they would rather help me fix it as soon as possible. But they are little expensive compared to Hostgator. So it’s your call. You can either go for low costing VPS by Hostgator or you can go for all great service from ServInt VPS.

P.S. It seems that Hostgator has not updated their website with VPS Hosting plans. It’s a soft launch as on now where they intend to keep the slot open for first 200 clients a month and then disable it the next month and then again enable them some other time. They offer VPS packages starting at $19.95 (Yikes!!!!) where in they offer 384MB RAM, 10GB DiskSpace and 250GB Bandwidth. They have 9 such packages with the highest at $209.95 a month which includes 5.96 GHz CPU, 4435MB RAM, 231GB, 3150GB Bandwidth. I could give the link straight away but i guess if they have not updated their website with VPS hosting packages then there has to be some reason and i don’t want to play a bad boy giving out the link. But i guess you can go to >> Hostgator and ask the chat technicians for the VPS package options. Else you can go ahead and checkout ServInt VPS hosting.

Samsung's Omnia II

Samsung Omnia II was launched in India on 21st October 2009. I was able to take a look at the handset on the same day at a Samsung showroom, owned by a friend of mine. And the very next day, i sold off my old Nokia E71 and got myself a brand new Samsung Omina II. Looks like i bought Nokia E71 back in January’2009….so i guess 10 months was pretty much it.

I really have never bought any Samsung mobile in my life, except for that Reliance powered cute white colored Samsung mobile that came with Reliance CDMA connection. Anyways, i won’t call that buying, as it was the only available set at that time. I always have trusted Nokia above all. And probably have equally used Sony Ericsson as well. But at this moment of time, Nokia is a big failure in Indian markets. No new models, nothing new whatsoever. It’s pretty annoying to see Nokia dying out from market this way. Anyways, why do i care. Samsung is the new king of the cellular phone market with so many exciting new phones, designs, features and pretty good prices. I am fan of good sound in such handsets, beside the other good features. And Samsung’s sound feature of WowHD, simply rocks. It really is outstanding.

Omnia II is not the first touch screen phone i have used. I started off with Sony Ericsson P900 wayback in 2004. After that i have used Nokia 7710 which was kind of brick but still pretty good. Then came the Apple iPhone which is the best touch screen enabled phone i have ever used. Unfortunately i had to replace iPhone just because it couldn’t offer a simple feature called “Quality in sound”. Neither the ring was audible nor any iPod songs or videos. Other than that there were no other flaws in iPhone that i couldn’t have ignored. Anyways, it’s not cool to compare Samsung Omnia II with Apple iPhone. Samsung are way behind from Apple when it comes to user interface, easiness and comfort of use and stuff like that. But Samsung do provide better quality videos and sounds. So i get that even’s it out.

Okay so, i got the Samsung Omnia II phone on 23rd October. Here’s how the box looks like!

Samsung Omnia II

All seals have been broken now. And the phone has been unpacked. It’s a sheer beauty. Bigger, better and brighter than any other phone i have ever used. It’s a Rose Black color handset. But until and unless i am under lot of bright sunshine, i will always see the color as black. As you must have noticed on the box, Samsung Omnia II works on windows mobile operating system. Okay so here is what the package contains:
1. Handset
2. Battery
3. Travel adapter (Charger)
4. CD-ROM
5. Stereo Headset
6. PC Data cable
7. Stylus Pen
8. Leather Case/Cover
9. TV Out Cable
10. User Manual

Samsung Omnia II

Omnia II has a 480X800 resolution and has a 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED touchscreen for Ultra brilliant display. With 5 megapixel camera and such a huge screen, this phone is the show stopper. The AMOLED screen is pretty large and amazing. It produces sharp and vibrant images thus making it all the more good looking. As compared to iPhone that used 16k colors, Omnia II uses 65k colors thus making it lot brighter and clearer and better quality. I was already in love with the phone.

Samsung Omnia II (Unpacked)

The battery is pretty huge. And with such high graphics and so much of exploring all day long, besides the other activities, this phone somehow manages to keep up the battery up for long durations. After the very first charging, i used it for good 60 hours before the next charge. That’s 2 and a half days. It’s pretty pretty good. For the specs, it has a 1500 mAh battery.

The camera is super cool. I haven’t experienced such a camera in any cell phone that i have owned previously. It has 5 megapixel auto focus camera and it has a dual LED flash which is really strong. The best features are the Geo-tagging, face detection, smile detection, image stabilization, super Wide Dynamic Range (WDR), D1(720×480) video recording at 30fps and QVGA @120fps.

Samsung Omnia II

I have three cellular phones after taking out Nokia E71 and replacing it with Samsung Omnia II. Ofcourse, it’s the biggest phone that i own as it is much bigger than iPhone! Here is some comparison pics. The junior on left is Sony Ericsson’s S500i. I just can’t it let it go for some reason and it has been with me for last 3 years or so.

Sony Ericsson S500i & Samsung Omnia II & Apple iPhone

Another look at these cellular handsets from a different angle:

Sony Ericsson S500i & Samsung Omnia II & Apple iPhone

I can really go on and on about the cell phone. I haven’t even described half it’s features yet! I guess right now it would be best to let the small specs do the talking

• General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/2100 MHz, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
• Dimensions: 118 x 59.6 x 11.9 mm
• Display: 3.7-inch 64K-color WVGA AMOLED touchscreen, 480 x 800 pixels, Advanced Resistive Touch
• Memory: 8/16GB storage memory, hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 32GB)
• OS: Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional with custom TouchWiz 2.0 UI with 3D effects
• CPU: 800 MHz
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP, standard microUSB port, standard 3.5mm audio jack, GPS receiver with A-GPS
• Accelerometer for screen auto rotate
• DivX/XviD video support
• FM radio with RDS
• DNSe
• Battery: 1500 mAh battery

Some people might face the problem of changing the font size in Samsung Omnia II. The font size in text messaging and related function is very large in size. To shorten the text size in Samsung Omnia II, you will first have to Seetings >> General Settings >>Samsung TouchWiz UI >> Disable Samsung Touchwiz UI. Now come back to main screen. Click on Start…there will be two Settings option. One will be the same one you accessed earlier. The other will be right at the bottom of the menu, just above “Help”. Click the Settings tab. In the bottom of screen you will see three tabs named “Personal, Sytrem and Connections”. Tab the system panel. In there you will see an option for Screen. Click on it and it will show you “Align screen” page. In the bottom there will be another panel called “Text Size”. Now make the size work as per your comfort. After you are done with this, you can enable Samsung TouchWiz again. Font size will not revert to old one.
I just searched for the same problem but couldn’t find any answer. Now that i do have the answer, i thought why not spread the message!!!!
If you have some queries about the phone or it’s features, then do let me know about it. Always here to help you out!