How to Prepare for a Hail Storm

Hail storms are frequent occurrences that usually don't cause extensive damage. However, a severe storm with hail stones up to 3 inches in diameter can cause significant damage. If you follow some simple precautions to prepare for a hail storm, you will keep yourself safe and minimize the damage to your house and car.

Prepare in Advance for a Hail Storm

Step1

Know the signs that a hail storm is approaching. Hail storms are produced by strong thunderstorms. Signs may include very dark clouds, strong winds, thunder and lightening and heavy rainfall.

Step2

Prepare a storm kit and make sure everyone in your household knows where it is. The kit should contain a flashlight, battery-operated radio, fresh batteries, candles, waterproof matches and emergency contacts.

Step3

Keep your trees trimmed, and watch for any branches that could fall on your house during a severe hail storm.

Step4

Check your roof for any damage that will make it more susceptible to a hail storm. If you are planning to remodel your house, consider impact resistant roofing to reduce hail damage to your roof.

Step5

Clear leaves and other debris from gutters and drainpipes so water can drain quickly.

Prepare for an Approaching Hail Storm

Step1

Close all windows and external doors if you see a storm approaching. Close curtains to protect against possible flying glass.

Step2

Provide shelter for any outdoor pets or farm animals. Animals are particularly vulnerable to hail.

Step3

Pull cars, boats and RVs into a covered area.

Step4

Pull lawn and patio furniture, garbage cans and other large objects into a protected area.

Tips & Warnings

• Large hail stones can fall at speeds faster than 100 miles per hour. If you see a hail storm approaching, take cover immediately, but do not stand under a tree because of the danger of lightning strikes.

How to Choose a Right Web Hosting Service?

How to Choose a Right Web Hosting Service?

Indeed, choosing a right web hosting service for your website is not an easy task especially when there are thousands of web hosting providers all offering almost identical web hosting packages. Therefore, it is important to know few major considerations even before you start your web hosting search. Below are three major criteria for web host seeker:

Web hosting features requirement

This is probably the most important consideration to start finding a host for your site. You need to decide the technical requirements for your website, this including:

a) Server platform and hardware requirements
If you plan to set up a website that uses programming environments such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic scripts, Cold Fusion or Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL database, in this case, you will need to find a web hosting service that supports Windows platform such as Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers.

Likewise, if you plan to use programming languages such as Perl, CGI, SSI, PHP or mySQL database, then any web hosting plans that support Unix/Linux platform should be sufficient to meet your hosting requirements. Once you have these server platform and hardware requirements in mind, you can decide the best web hosting plans for your need. For more information, you can read "How to select a web server and server platform?"

b) Disk space & Bandwidth requirement
Here is another technical requirement that you need to consider before selecting a web hosting plan, i.e. disk space and bandwidth. If you intend to publish a website that does not have a lot of contents (meaning, web pages), then the disk space requirement may not be a big concern to you. In general, a disk space with 200MB to 500MB should be enough to meet your hosting requirement. In contrast, if you plan to host a website with enormous amount of graphic pictures, mp3 or video files, then you should consider a web hosting plan that provide huge disk space, for example, 500 MB to 1,000 MB.

Similarly, the bandwidth requirement will depend on your site traffic estimation. Obviously, a website that expect to attract high traffic will consume the monthly bandwidth allowance very fast. If so, you will need to find one web hosting service that offer huge bandwidth with 40 GB to 100 GB per month. Depending upon your website requirement, choosing a web hosting service that provide sufficient amount of disk space and bandwidth is crucial consideration to prevent paying extra costs in the future should you overuse the monthly disk space and bandwidth allowance.

c) Other hosting features
While the above requirements are utmost important, there are other hosting features that you have to consider too. Can web hosting provider support video clips on your website, if you have? Is the web hosting service compatible with Dreamweaver or FrontPage web authoring tool? Do you plan to set up a virtual store online? Can the host support the e-commerce features without adding extra cost to your monthly payments? On top of that, you may also want to find out the number of email accounts provided, number of FTP accounts, web statistic software (analyze your web traffic), type of control panel supported (manage your web hosting account), database and scripting languages supported and etc.

Reliability and scalability

A first-class web hosting provider offers reliable server uptime and fast Internet connection. You should only choose a web hosting service that guarantee at least 99% server uptime with high-speed Internet backbones using at least OC3 (Optical Carrier) lines (155 Megabits per second) or above instead of T1 or T3 lines. A reliable web hosting provider usually invests heavily on their data center infrastructure with high performance servers, high speed multiple backbones providers with fail-over redundancy, backup power generators and firewall software protection in place to ensure they meet the uptime guarantee specified in the terms of service.

Similarly, you should choose a web hosting service with hardware facilities that designed for scalability, so that they can grow with your business. For example, if you need to increase more disk space, bandwidth or number of mySQL databases, you should be able to upgrade as needed without any problems.

Customer service and support

The last major consideration in choosing a web hosting service is to find a web hosting providers that offers excellent customer service and support. You should always search for a web hosting provider that offers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week technical support that fielded with highly experience technicians, so that any web hosting problems will be resolved within a reasonable amount of time. You may also want to consider to test how responsive is their customer support by sending few inquiry emails to the web hosting provider. In general, any response in less than 24 hours is considered acceptable. It is a sign of poor customer support if they take more than one day to response.

In addition, a web hosting provider with excellent support should also provide multiple support channels, such as toll-free phone support, 24/7 email support, live chat, online knowledgebase, Interactive flash tutorials and FAQ.

Above are few major considerations before you choose your web hosting service. In addition, how long has the web hosting provider in business and the number of customers that they currently have are also a good indication of the quality of their hosting products as well as the stability of the company. Even though cost of the web hosting service is also important but it should not be your major consideration. Because the price of a web hosting service has been declining over the years due to competition, as a result, the price of most of the web hosting services offering quality hosting features has been converging to less than US$10 per month. If you can't afford less than $10 per month, you probably isn't in the online business for the long haul. Therefore, price should not be a major deciding factor.

On the other hand, it is more important to ensure the web hosting service that you choose is able to meet your website hosting requirements, guarantee your website is always accessible with satisfying speed, provide scalability to grow and expand your website as well as offer excellent customer supports.

HTC Touch Diamond vs. Samsung i900 Omnia: Head-to-Head

It's PocketPC playoffs and HTC are giving Samsung a match at the GSM Arena. With two of the stars of the season arriving in our office all at once, we thought it's a heck of an opportunity for some Diamond-Omnia-Diamond-Omnia-Diamond-Omnia game-set-match with a pinch of iPhone flavor. We got two aces up to the challenge, so sit back and stretch out. Ah well, get that six-pack too and join us for the kick-off.

HTC Touch Diamond official photos

Diamond over Omnia:

• VGA display (2.8-inch, 480 x 640 pixels)
• TouchFLO 3D Home screen (better than Omnia's Touchwiz UI)
• Nicer design
• More compact body
• Lighter weight
• Active magnetic stylus (Omnia has no stylus slot)
• Touch-sensitive scroll wheel (better than Omnia's optical joystick)
• Better sunlight legibility (by a small margin)
• Standard miniUSB slot (as opposed to Samsung's proprietary custom plus)
• Dedicated graphics chip with 64MB memory
• Comes with the amusing Teeter game (uses the accelerometer)
• Has pre-installed YouTube client and MP3 Trimmer application for ringtones
• Better video playback performance

Samsung i900 Omnia official photos

Omnia over Diamond:

• Bigger, though lower-res display (3.2", 240 x 400 pixels)
• Has a better, more solid build and finish
• Almost double battery life
• Better CPU performance (by a nice margin according to software benchmarks)
• Quad-band GSM support (Diamond has two versions to cover all the four bands)
• microSD card slot (Diamond has none)
• 8 or 16 GB of storage memory (Diamond has 4GB)
• Much better 5 megapixel camera (better processing, higher resolution, face and smile detection, geotagging)
• TV-out (Diamond lacks that)
• Landscape QWERTY keyboard (Diamond has one but only in browser)
• Auto screen rotation is available in all applications and can be switched off
• Comes with DivX video support (Diamond has none, but DivX players can be installed)
• Has pre-installed a custom Alarms app, a Video editor and a unit converter

Samsung i900 Omnia and HTC Touch Diamond might differ here and there in specs but no doubt we're talking fine top-of-the-shelf species. Never before have Windows Mobile powered devices been so rich in features without being coyote-ugly (another way of saying TyTN-bulky).

It's been a year now since Apple iPhone is out and its ground-breaking user interface took the industry by a storm. Windows Mobile however still fails to pick up the gauntlet thrown by the iPhone so device manufacturers are creating their own customized touch interfaces that don't necessarily require a stylus to make the Microsoft OS a bit more competitive and much more intuitive.

It took almost a year to see all manufacturers introduce their solutions. With the HTC Touch Diamond we are looking at the third generation TouchFLO UI - a really mature and impressive piece of software. The Omnia and its TouchWiz UI is Samsung's first attempt in this field, but they're building on their expertise in full touchscreen feature phones and they have achieved some impressive results too.

So you already probably guess that we will be spicing up today's Windows Mobile competition with a few Apple iPhone quotes. With the iPhone 3G just behind the corner, we think that several key generic comparisons might be of use to most of you. But for starters, check out some photos of the contenders lining up for the Windows Mobile cup. Slick, aye?

HTC Touch Diamond

Samsung i900 Omnia

Before we begin today's match, we should warn you about the units we are testing. The Samsung i900 Omnia is still a beta version, while the HTC Touch Diamond is a retail unit. However, dozens of bugs are being reported for the Diamond recently, so it isn't actually as stable as it should be. In fact, HTC are struggling to polish the Diamond performance, which - even though utterly impressive - is rather unfinished at its launch. Looks like HTC made haste to beat the iPhone 3G announcement.

The three hottest touch devices of the season