User:Jana van Wyk/Sandbox

SnapBill is an online billing and service provisioning system developed by Lusion Technologies, a privately owned South African web development and web hosting company. Lusion Technologies is located in Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa. SnapBill includes several features, such as recurring billing, client and correspondence management, online payment collection, real time statistics and support tickets. SnapBill was chiefly developed for use by South African freelancers, small to medium-sized businesses and professionals.

Company
Lusion Technologies was founded in 2003 by Joshua Yudaken, currently a third year student studying a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town. Jaco van Wyk, a internet entrepreneur with a BIS Multimedia degree from the University of Pretoria, joined the company in 2004 as co-owner. Lusion Technologies is a small privately owned web development and web hosting company based in South Africa. The company hosts their servers in a data centre in the United States of America and in the Internet Solutions (IS) Hosting's Internet Data Centres (IDC) in Johannesburg, South Africa. Apart from its web hosting services Lusion Technologies' website programmers and web designers have also developed several iphone, facebook and web 2.0 applications. SnapBill being the most recent of these developments.

Development history
SnapBill was developed by the web developers and programmers at Lusion Technologies. The origins of the SnapBill system lay in Lusion Technologies need to manage its own web hosting services, clients and billing.

The original system, launched in 2006, was called Lusion AHS (Automated Hosting Systems). Lusion AHS was an automated web hosting management system created for website designers and developers. It facilitated the creation of web hosting accounts, automated registration of domain names, billing of clients and management of payments. Lusion AHS was only available to Lusion Technologies web hosting resellers.

In 2008 the decision was made to actively evolve Lusion AHS into a publicly accessible online billing and service provisioning system. Through two years of practical use and improvement Lusion AHS evolved into SnapBill. Several improvements were made to the Lusion AHS system to effect this evolution:
 * Addition of more powerful service provisioning functionality
 * Expansion of the systems billing and client management features

SnapBill was opened for selective pre-registration in February 2010 and launched to the general public, in South Africa only, on 1 March 2010. Global registrations will only be available once trials in South Africa have been completed. International users may for now request an invitation.

The graph below indicates growth as charted from Lusion Technologies' establishment in 2003. It indicates the launch of Lusion AHS and SnapBill and their respective impact on the companies growth.