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.

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!

It’s been a long time since AllyDirectory.com and SharatJaswal.com have been online. I have been waiting long enough for Google results to show up correctly!

Now, as many of you must have noticed, when you search for particular word and mis-spell it, Google automatically adds a red line just before the search results saying “Did you mean….”. It’s called the spell check. It corrects the mis-spelled word and asks you if you wanted to search for the right word. And so far it works great.

The only problem i face is with some particular n personal search words. For example:

"Ally Directory" Search At Google

Google has been kind to give “Ally Directory” some sitelinks. And it’s been months now. Yet when i search for “ally directory”, Google returns the results with a red line in front saying “Did you mean alley directory”. Well no buddy, i did mean to search for Ally Directory.

Similarly with “Sharat Jaswal”. This is equally amazing. I exist on most of the social networks. I have a personal blog that is just my name. But Google search will still return “Did you mean Sharad Jaiswal”

"Sharat Jaswal" Result In Google

Argggghhhh! Who is Sharad Jaiswal? Why not when we search for “Sharad Jaiswal”, we get the spell checker saying “Did you mean Sharat Jaswal” ????

Anyways…there is a simple answer to this. Google, being such a vast company and such a huge search engine takes care of billions of sites or even might be trillions. It’s not gonna look specifically at the word “Sharat Jaswal” or something. They have brilliant algorithms and it’s all working great. So how do i improve the results and spell checker?. Simple! Let Google know about it.

When you search for a particular phrase or keyword in Google, go to the bottom of the page. Google asks you if you are Dissatisfied with the results. If Yes, click on that link to help them improve. And they are not just saying it. They mean it too. It’s true, Google does listen to you, No matter what many webmaster’s say about it. Yes, i do wish it was great in three more niche: Soft Corner for Directories; If they could forget the paid links things and continue as it always was and if they can have better algorithms for calculating PageRank. Just a dream. Internet shall be a better place once again.