Need help making my website a referral site

I want to make my website, so that when someone signs up to my program through it, they get a duplicate of my website for their use, with a referral number, so that they can promote it, and when someone signs up through them, they get the credit. And when someone signs up under them, they get a duplicate of the site and referral number, and so on and so forth, on down the line. How do I do that?

Thank you for your time and help!

James

IF you don't have to register domain names for each new site (for example, each new site is like http://maindomain.com/website97), and IF you are doing this on your own Linux server (vs. shared hosting), then creating the sites is pretty easy (see below). You should be able to keep track of credits with some basic PHP (or equivalent) and SQL.

First, set up a model website that you will copy from. Then, write a bash or python script (or equivalent) to:

1) copy the web files from a model site into a new directory
2) edit the config file (using "sed" to change the database credentials, etc.
3) copy a template database into a new one for the new site (using mysqldump and mysql commands)
4) create a new database user (mysql CREATE USER and GRANT commands)
5) edit database records to customize for the new site (mysql UPDATE commands)

A script like this should take about a day or so to design, write, test and debug.

And if they aren't running their own server, then ????

That's a little trickier because it depends on the permissions you have granted to you on the server. For example, you could still perform similar logic using php, like making a copy of the web files and copying the database, but depending on the shared hosting setup, you might not have permissions to create a new database, or to copy the files into a new web root. In fact, most all shared setups won't allow this because they run PHP in CGI mode (rather than using mod_php) for security reasons - the CGI is configured to run not as an Apache user, but as the website owner.

So in a pinch, I guess you can add new tables to your existing database (using table prefix names to keep the sites separate), and you can use subdirectories in the main webroot to hold the various generated websites. However there is a security issue since the owners of the different subsite are all running under the same server user account, so they would have access to each other's files and data. The web site itself would have to be configured such that owners of the subsites can't touch subsites owned by others.