Today I have to introduce am additional credit charge which will help reduce SnapCasa misuse and make things more fair for our users.  Effective immediately SnapCasa will charge 3 credits for each webpage request which is being captured or requested for the first time.  This applies to both Basic and Premium requests.  I realize that this change will increase credit use by our users, especially those who cache our snapshots on their own servers.  To help our current users cope with this sudden change I will permanently increase the monthly credit allowance of Basic users to 500,000.  For all of our current Premium users I have tripled your premium credit balances.

There are two reasons why this change was necessary.  Firstly, it will make things more fair for users and enable me to maintain optimal performance of our processing servers.  We have had several users before who required several hundred thousand unique webpage captures.   Capturing these snapshots puts a much greater load on our servers than a user who requests a limited number of unique snapshots several hundred thousand times.   Charging the extra 3 credits per unique webpage will enable me to deploy additional processing servers with demand and maintain optimal performance. 

The second reason this change was necessary is because it will enable me to develop a few additional user requested features.  Without the extra charge the new features would not be developed because they had the potential for misuse.  The first of these features will be released next week.

If you have any feedback about this change you can contact me directly by using the Contact form on SnapCasa.com.

Today I am happy to introduce a Premium feature which will enable our users to make snapshot requests using Flash.  In the redesigned Register Domains Page users will find a new Client Side Requests section.  Enabling client side requests for your account will generate a Request Key which will be unique to your account.  This key should be included with every request that originates from a clients machine instead of a website domain or server IP like so:

http://snapcasa.com/get.aspx?code=1000&key=CERT82IE&size=s&url=ebay.com

It is important to know that this key value should never be visible to your visitors.  It is strictly made for use with Flash or similar technologies which allow you to conceal the images source from the end user.  If you feel that someone managed to get a hold of your request key value you can request a new one from within the Register Domains page.  The old key value will become invalid as soon as a new one is issued.

This feature does not cost any credits for Premium Users and is not available to Basic users at this time.  You can see a live implementation of this feature here.  The flash animation on that page makes requests to SnapCasa without registering your IP. 

Enjoy this new feature and make sure you check back here again soon as there are many major improvements and new features coming to SnapCasa!