Before setting up your website you need to ask yourself whether the site will be making use of international or local hosting.  International hosting has usually won the argument in the past with cheaper packages offering more bandwidth, but you may be pleasantly surprised with recent developments in the local hosting industry. Maybe even enough to bring out your ‘proud South African’ streak and motivate you to move your website’s hosting to a local server. Join me as I have a look into what the South African web hosting market can offer you and why it may be a good time to start hosting at home.

It is essential to identify your businesses’ needs before making a choice between hosting locally or internationally. Identifying your needs will ensure that you choose a hosting solution that not only provides your website with a home on the internet, but will encourage your business to grow and flourish. I have broken down a few key points for you to consider when pondering the benefits of hosting locally.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lusion Technologies is very proud of our relationship with Snapbill. You might ask what Snapbill is so we will try and give you a quick summary.

Snapbill:

SnapBill is a billing system that allows you to easily sell online. SnapBill is perfect for businesses requiring automated subscription or recurring billing with payment collection facilities. Unlike many other billing solutions, SnapBill fully automates both credit card transactions and direct debit orders via a variety of payment gateways.

You may customise SnapBill to fully suit your brand, send invoices, manage clients, process payments and efficiently automate all your billing requirements. SnapBill presents your data in a user-friendly manner and allows you to modify, query, manage and monitor clients, services, invoices and payment collections.

SnapBill offers a comprehensive mix of invoicing, billing, client management and payment collection features. It has integrated service provisioning functionality so you may list and sell your own services through SnapBill while it fully automates your recurring and subscription billing.

SnapBill is secure, automated and always available. Use it anywhere in the world, from any web enabled device and at any time. Find out more by taking the tour »

Lusion/Snapbill Relationship:

Users of Snapbill can go into their setup section and activate the services of Lusion Technologies. Here users can customise their own hosting services which piggy back off the Lusion Products.

All we can say is go and try it for yourself, it is a very easy way to host your own clients and earn some extra income.

cPanel is a graphical web-based control panel that helps you quickly and easily manage your website and hosting account. cPanel gives you complete control over a vast amount of functions, streamlining useful processes such as:

• Creating databases
• Managing website files
• Setting up email accounts & auto responders

cPanel has grown to become the most popular web hosting control panel, running millions of websites around the world. cPanel was created to give server and website owners control over their properties. Whether you’re managing one, or hundreds, of servers and/or websites, cPanel’s user friendly point-and-click interface allows you to customize your web hosting experience to fit your needs.

Lusion Technologies runs all it’s hosting off cPanel for various reasons, amongst them are:

1. cPanel makes the website hosting easy as it works on an intuitive graphical interface that makes it easier to edit almost all the applications that are present on the website
2. cPanel comes with Fantastico that makes website creation simple. Fantastico enables the users to install the scripts and software applications on their web server
3. cPanel also facilitates easy management of the domains; this is an important feature for the newbies as well as the veteran webmasters
4. It also becomes easy to manage the email accounts with cPanel. You can easily create email addresses based on your domain names
5. cPanel also enables you to edit the web pages, you can also load discussion boards, forums, polls, surveys etc.

Since it’s launch to the South African public in March 2010 SnapBill, Lusion Technologies online billing and service provisioning system, has gone from strength to strength. Like SnapBill many online billing systems claim to be easy to use, affordable and fully brandable, but as we all know the proof is in the pudding. So we asked Quintin van Rooyen, author of the SaGeek blog, to test drive the SnapBill system and let us know what he thought.

You will be pleased to know that SnapBill passed the test with flying colours.

“SnapBill is what e-commerce in South Africa has been waiting for. I give SnapBill a Q rating of Four out of Five… In fact, I am so impressed with SnapBill that it will be the first product that I will list on my ‘Sageek Recommended Products‘ page.”

Check out the full SaGeek SnapBill review here.

If you don’t put your two cents in, how can you get change?

Are you tech savvy? Do you write your own blog? Then we want you! The SnapBill system is constantly being updated and improved. We would therefore like to invite you to test drive the SnapBill system and let us know what you think. If you would like to review the system or give us feedback feel free to drop us an email.

First National Bank (FNB) recently released PayPal for South Africa after closing an exclusive deal with the international payment gateway. Consequently you may have heard the buzz emanating from SnapBill’s seamless integration of PayPal and be wondering how you, as a South African PayPal account holder, can enable and use this payment method. Read on to find out what the PayPal payment option in SnapBill entails, what you need to use the service and how to go about enabling it.

What PayPal integration means for the SnapBill user

If you are a FNB account holder you can now get a PayPal account which will not only allow you to send money, but also receive funds from millions of potential international customers. SnapBill has recognised the potential this holds for it’s users and integrated PayPal to offer all SnapBill users and their clients another safe and easy way to get their SnapBill invoices paid.

SnapBill currently supports payments for SnapBill generated invoices in ZAR and USD via credit card and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). With the new PayPal integration SnapBill users can also accept payments in USD via PayPal from any of the over 200 million PayPal users in 190 countries and regions. Only PayPal payments in USD are supported since PayPal payments are only done in USD (there is currently no support for South African Rand).

What you need to enable PayPal in SnapBill

You will need to have the following to use this service:

	A PayPal account
	Qualifying FNB personal or business current account (Visit the FNB website to view their conditions)
	A Free or Premium SnapBill account

Read the rest of this entry »

Getting your SnapBill generated invoices paid has never been so easy!

SnapBill, Lusion Technologies’ free online, white label, billing and service provisioning system will be among the first South African online billing systems to seamlessly integrate PayPal, offering all SnapBill users another safe, easy way to pay and get paid online.

Read the rest of this entry »