Snap!

Create Your Own Web Hosting Service with Snap!

Do you want to host your customers websites?

Tired of going through the Drupal installation process over and over again?

Snap! is the best solution for your needs.

Snap! is the de-facto complement to the advanced Drupal CMS and Snap! includes hundreds of powerful features that let you create complete websites in less than 5 minutes.

Made to Order Software is using Snap! as a website hosting SaaS product.

Snap! lets Made to Order Software customers get their websites up and running in 5 minutes, after purchasing hosting using our cart1 or entering their first name and email address for our free trial offer.

Websites are installed using Drupal Core, third party, and Made to Order Software modules. The installation starts with the Snap! profile (also called base) and proceeds with Snap! features.

The Snap! profile installs everything your customers needs to start building websites. This includes Drupal Core, and a few third party modules that are indispensable such as a WYSIWYG editor, Comment Mail2 and Role Delegation3.

Snap! features are additional capabilities used to increase the power of your customer's websites. A feature is a set of modules automatically installed and initialized by the Snap! feature system. Customize websites exactly the way you and your customers want them to be. A very important aspect of Snap! features, is that they can be sold to your customers for a one time fee or a monthly subscription.

Snap! has numerous features. The following is a very small snapshot:

• AdSense: gives your user the ability to insert AdSense boxes on their website
• File Attachment: by default (especially for free trials) we prevent file attachments, this feature turns on this capability for your customers
• SEO: we have several levels of SEO features such as an XML sitemap, page keywords, Facebook, Twitter, advanced RSS, etc.
• Help: complete online help system4
• Themes: sell access to theme packages

Technical Requirements to run Snap!

• Ubuntu Server Edition (10.04 LTS or better)
• Drupal 6.x (6.17 or better)
• PostgreSQL 8.x (8.2 or better)5
• Apache 2.x
• CRON to run the Snap! CRON script
• 3rd party Drupal extensions from Drupal.org and by Made to Order Software
• MO Websites (this is the Snap! module!)

To get more information about Snap!, please register: Snap! registration form.

• 1. Snap! is 100% compatible  with the free Übercart module available on Drupal.org.
• 2. We use Comment Mail to enhance the handling of new comments on our websites. It notifies the administrators of new comments or replies to existing comments. Plus, it gives the administrator a way to quickly delete and ban spammers.
• 3. When you create a Drupal website for customers, you generally don't make them full Administrators (actually, if you do so on a multi-website server, you take the huge risk of getting hacked within hours. So, unless the customer is a close friend, don't do that!) Normally you want to create a role named Admin and assign that role to the customers in charge of the website content. This way you can select what the Admin users can do and not do. However, Drupal permissions are not flexible enough to authorize the Admin users to assign roles to other users, not without making Admins full Administrators. Snap! resolves this limitation by installing the Role Delegation 3^rd party module.
• 4. The Snap! help system is particularly useful to help newbies who have never had a website before and need more hand holding to finish their website setup and get started.
• 5. Snap! does not currently support MySQL. MySQL is known for having many weaknesses which, from our point of view, are not acceptable in a professional environment.