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.

I just joined Sponsored Tweets few days ago, so i won’t go into too many details about the payouts and how much money can someone make out of it. I mean, once i get some money rolling into my account from Sponsored Tweets only then i will totally recommend it for you as a “must do” thing. Until then, atleast just join it and begin the process of what could be the easiest way to make money online just by twittering.

So what exactly is Sponsored Tweets. Well it’s a simple twitter advertising platform, owned by IZEA, which actually connects the advertisers with the tweeters. Simply put, the advertisers, already promoting the product, places the ads on twitter. You just have to spread the word and earn from it. All ethical advertisement/promotion in less than 160 characters, how difficult can it be for anyone? It’s simply PPT or we can call it Pay-Per-Tweet program.

First things first, you really need to have an account on Twitter. You should have a minimum of 200 followers and your twitter account should be at least 4 months old. So join Twitter today itself. When you have met these conditions then you can go ahead and join Sponsored Tweets, which is a white-listed twitter application and will require your twitter credentials to create an account. The advertisers simply don’t like Twitter accounts that are less than 120 days old. This factor reduces the risk of unethical business or spammy tweeters.

Although i really do not need to explain the process of joining process and using SponsoredTweets simply for the reason that it already has been very well explained on their site itself. Still, for those who have not been tempted yet to head off to their website: well, after joining in, SponsoredTweets will first of call calculate a recommended price for you that you should charge per tweet. Mine initially came out to $7.96 per tweet. Which is suggested for me to charge the advertiser for tweeting their tweets. Pretty good for anything less than 160 characters, haan? Anyways, i am really not bound to use this suggested price which actually is based on factors like number of followers, age of the account and number of tweets etc. I can put up $1.00 per tweet if i want or even $100. All up to me. And yes, i have seen many tweeple making $1000 and above already from Sponsored Tweets. Anyways, moving ahead, once you have the recommended price for your tweets, you just need add a bit of details regarding yourself and what you normally tweet about the most. That’s it. You are done. Now you just have to wait for offers to run in. Advertisers will checkout your profile and BOOM!!! the money starts flowing in.

Don’t forget, you will have the complete control on the advertisements that you want to tweet. You will get a mail from Sponsored Tweets when an advertisers shows an interest. Those ads will go into your account panel waiting for your approval. Simply reject the ad if you don’t like it or approve them. You even get the option wherein you can decide whether the tweet content has to be written by the advertiser or you’ll write your own content yourself. There are even some non-profit/charitable offers which you can enable or disable, publish or reject. That’s full control of your sponsored tweets for you!

So how does all this stuff sound to you? It sounded pretty good to me and i have already joined the program and have started making more money. There is absolutely no limit of money, that you can make from this program. It all depends on who you are and what you are with twitter. If advertisers love your tweets, then you should be ready to make a fortune, just by tweeting. Why don’t you head off to Sponsored Tweets right now and make me feel good about my post and effort, just so that you can make a good money. Ain’t asking much, Is It?

By the way, if it’s any consolation, Sponsored Tweets also offer referral program. You get 10% of SponsoredTweets portion of revenue for each successful transaction that Tweeter makes. Or, If you sign up an Advertiser you will earn 5% of Sponsored Tweets earnings for each transaction they make. That’s a bonus!

Tweet Stats : I’m ranked 20th in India and 9250th in World, with 5335 followers as on 29th September according to Twitterholic. All this in 6 months is pretty nice i guess. Just passing on little info

The world has come to a funny point wherein some people will try to sell you anything. Literally anything. Even those things that you already own. Yes, i know it’s funny, but a recent incident from a premium domain name seller certainly proves my point.

It so happened that a so-called premium domain seller company recently sent me a mail regarding a domain “negar-khan.com”. At first my impression was, well that’s a nice domain, but two seconds later, i was shocked and realized that i am the actual owner of this domain, anyways. The domain is for an actress and a model called Negar Khan. I guess she needs a little introduction as she is pretty famous already, because of her film career, television appearances, modeling and modeling incidents. Anyways, the point is how can this domain company list my domain for sale, without any rights or without any kinda ownership. I am still wondering how will they go ahead with the transaction if someone actually does buy the domain from their website.

I ain’t pointing fingers at this hour. Maybe it’s a mistake, maybe they previously held the domain and somehow forgot renewing it, or maybe it could really be a scam. I really don’t know. I guess i really had to inform you all about this incident, maybe because if it wasn’t for this domain and if had been a mailed about some other domain like abcd.com, then i could have fallen for such thing. I could have paid the domain seller an amount of $200 as mentioned on the site. And really got nothing. So in true sense, a heads up for all of you who deal in domains market.

I stick the point again that i ain’t blaming this company as on now, until i know the facts clearly. But thinking about it, first of all this company sends me emails without my consent. I never asked for offers or signed in for any such promotions. So basically they are using my email address without my consent. Secondly they are offering my domain for sale without ownership and again without my consent. You know what, i think i am going to sue this company now. What do you say?

Just in case if i am asked for proof in the future if such thing actually happened, well here are some screenshots to hold my story:

(Click on thumbnails for full sized image)

As for tips, i guess it’s best to check who is records for the domain from DomainTools. Any suspicion or irregularities in the data is worth inquiring about. And it would be pretty cool if you do not buy a domain just for pagerank. Remember my words “Pagerank: Here today, Gone tomorrow”. I don’t know why i am mentioning Google pagerank here, but i guess i just had to bring it up someway or the other.

Twitter, as most of you must be knowing by now, is the fastest growing social networking site with million of users as their members. Obviously, i am part of it as well and I’m simply loving it. I joined twitter on 7th of March’2009 which apparently was pretty late considering the fact that twitter was launched publicly on August of 2006

Twitter

Twitter is growing at a rapid speed. Probably faster than any other social networking website. Simplicity has really played a great role in it’s success. Twitter is all about “What are you doing?” and the idea of connecting with other people brings in million of people worldwide to join and use twitter. It also acts as a real time short messaging service as it can be used via cell phones, various desktop applications n API’s and of course from the twitter website itself. The best part is, that you can follow many popular celebrities on Twitter and know what they are up to, And if you lucky enough, you might end up being good friends and have long chats with them.

There is however one thing that most twitter users do not know and there are not many source you can get this information from. Twitter have set some following and daily follow limits that you should be aware of. I have listed the limits below along with a detailed description on all.

• Maximum Following Limit : Twitter has set the maximum following limit to 2000 or 110% of your total followers. This means, that you can follow only 2000 people in total, until and unless you have that many followers as well. Calculating 110 % for 2000 followings, you should have at least 1820 people following you in order to raise your limit of 2000 followers. In simpler terms you first limit is of 2000 followers and thereafter you can follow maximum of 110% of the total followers you have. For example if you have 5000 followers, you will be able to follow a maximum of 5500 twitter users only.
• Daily Following Limit : I have noticed many people asking me this very question on twitter pretty often. How many people can i follow on twitter every day? Well, the answer is simple. Twitter limits the number of accounts that a single person can follow in a day to 1,000. Thereafter, either your account will be flagged, suspended, banned or probably you will not be able to follow any one else! My advice would be to keep it under the scanner. Do not follow more than 500 members a day.
• Maximum Follower Limit : So how many people can follow you on a daily basis? Answer would be, infinity. There are no limits on that. It’s out of your control as to how many people follow you. So it would be little stupid to have a follower limit. (You can however control the number of people that follow you. Go to settings and check the box which says “Protect my Updates”. Thereafter people will have to send request to you so that they can follow you and only those will be allowed whom you approve.)

I tried to explain as easily as i could but i may have messed up a little, while ignoring all the technical terms that i could have used. So if i didn’t make sense, Roll Out on Floor and Laugh Out Loud ROFLOL. Thereafter, just use the comment section and ask me the thing you didn’t understand. I will make it more clear for you!

Alright, so presuming that i have explained the twitter limits successfully, i think it’s a good time to mention some of the Twitter tools that i really prefer and recommend for all twitterers.

• Twitter Karma : It’s one tool that i use on a daily basis. If you ever notice my stats (except on Friday’s due to #F0llowFriday participation), you will see that my stats of people whom i am following and my followers are always the same. I use twitter karma for keeping such stats. You simply have to login by filling up your twitter email address and password or you can sign in with twitter ID itself. Once signed in, it will find all your twitter followers and people whom you follow and very briefly it will show three categories of people. First one being people who follow you and you follow them back. Second will be of people who are following you but you are not following them back. Third and last category is of people whom you are following but they aren’t following you back. So thereafter, it’s very simple. I just select people who are not following back, select them all by a single click of button provided on site and “Bulk Unfollow” them. Similarly with people whom i am not following back, i select them all and “Bulk Follow” them. So now you know. You can’t escape me if you unfollow me as i will do the same for you!
• Twitter Follower : It’s a very very new site and just started two days back. Apparently the site is owned by John Chow! I first read about it on his web blog. Here is the link >> “Twitter Follower Launch”. I will have to say that he got a great domain for the tool. It matches perfectly with the role of this tool. It’s basically a well organized list of all those twitter users who have agreed to follow back each and every user who follows them. I signed up with them yesterday night and my Twitter stats have gone up by nearly 150 users in less than 12 hours. It really works and it’s highly recommended. Also, the tool has a mass unfollow button that unfollows all users who are not following you back. That is great but Twitter Karma and FriendOrFollow.com already does that so nothing very cool about it. There is one thing though, the site certainly do what it says it will. But overall, the site sucks as there is no design on homepage, no contact us, no about us, no feedback or suggestion form. Maybe it will come up soon as the site is still new but i expected better looks from a John Chow’s website!
• TwitPic : You know you can’t share pics on twitter but TwitPic solves that problem for you. I have it bookmarked although i am yet to make use of it and explore it in all ways. But i love the concept and i love how it helps in shortening image URL’s for the tweeple! So, if you ever feel like sharing a pic, just upload it to Twit Pic, then tweet the url it provides and all Twitter friend of yours would be all to see it,and even comment on it.
• Twitter Counter : I love stats and there are at least dozen web tools that work with twitter statistics. However, i really like Twitter Counter of the lot. First of all they provide a button with my follower stats on it. You can see that in action on the right side of my blog just above the flags/language translator. Besides that, their stats tell me about the total followers i have, how many followers have been added since yesterday and what is the likely prediction for tomorrow or 30 days from now on. It even let’s you tweet these stats. Lastly, it also display your Global or local rankings among some 2 million twitter users who are hooked up with Twitter Counter.

I did want to mention TweetMeMe.com which basically works like Digg.com. It shows the hottest stories on twitter. It’s user voted concept wherein twitter guys retweet the stories and most popular stories show up on the main website of TweetMeMe. You will see there widget on my site also and if you can then don’t forget to retweet my post! Now why i didn’t mention it along the above tools is because i consider it more of web site rather than a web tool. Pretty simple

I do use some more twitter tools but the above mentioned twitters tools are the most popular and often used. I hope you like them and i will appreciate your comments on this article. Thanks!

As many of you must be knowing, twitter is THE next best thing that happened to internet social networking. Other social networking sites like MySpace and Google Orkut, etc may simply are fading out slowly and will soon go down as memories. I do not mean to say that those networking sites weren’t good. They had their days but simply can’t keep up with the growing trend of networking. Facebook is still pretty good networking site but in my opinion, i still think Twitter is far better. Anyways……

I basically wrote this post for people who have already signed up with twitter or are really thinking of the same. I made an account a week back and am really enjoying my stay in there. I have followed some 900 people so far including likes of Lance Armstrong, Britney Spears, Barack Obama, CNN, John Chow, Shoemoney, Problogger, Gul Panag and many many others. I really don’t feel ashamed to follow many others randomly as it gives me a chance to know them better. And you know what, many people think on the same lines. Out of 900, around 455 tweeple (twitter people) have followed me back and that does include John Chow and ProBlogger. It feels good to be followed by so many people. It’s basically your social network or your fan following. So basically, everything is going in the right direction. Perhaps, this much information on twittering might interest some of you to join it right away. Am really hoping to motivate my good friend Nicole Price on to twitter.

Okay, so moving ahead. Joining twitter is one part of deal. How do you go to twitter plus stage?

Well, making your twitter profile look unique is one way to go. If you are keen on making an impact with your brand name, then probably a good designed profile is the best solution. And when it comes to twitter profile designing, there is one and only Hugh Briss from Twitter Images. He has already created twitter backgrounds for some of the Internet biggest bloggers like John Chow, ProBlogger, DesignerDepot and many others in all kind of niche business. He charges $100 for the twitter background design, which considering your brand is pretty reasonable amount. Either you can have a great “branded” design from Twitter Images or you can probably have the same backgrounds that million other twitter users are using. It’s all about the brand and about being professional.

So if you think your brand really matters to you, i would recommend you to at least visit Twitter Images and see the designs yourself. I am sure you will be fully satisfied with the design from Hugh Briss.

If you however cannot afford $100 for the design, you may want to checkout the other free but good looking backgrounds from Twitter Images.

Update: I actually had an affiliate link to Twitter Images.com, but if you have been keeping up with that site, you might be knowing that Hugh Briss has discontinued the affiliate system. Now i cannot delete this article for content issues, so i have removed my affiliate link and placed a direct link to his site. Thanks