How Does A Whitelabel Work? (Technical Thread)
 

Does anyone know the technical mechanics of how a white label works?

Say you own the domain abc.com and want to promote a cam program using their white label technology, you as the affiliate would simply setup your domain abc.com to point to their whitelabel servers IP address or CNAME to it (after creating a WL profile in their system) and wa la your done.

But from a technical standpoint how does all that work? anyone?

The whitelabel server would have a virtual host listening on * (or aliased to *) and as such would accept all incoming requests from any domain and serve back the content on that WL server. But how does the WL server distinguish what which WL profile to send back to domain abc.com? Is there some sort of marker somewhere in that system which can identify all this?

Perhaps when a WL profile is created, does it create a unique doc root and assigns that profile to that doc root and a backgroup WL app monitors for all incoming requests for site abc.com?

Or is there some sort of re-write rule which happens on the server side to manage all this?

Thanks in advance

There are many different setups, some simple and quick, some more advanced or focused on security, etc... so there isn't one general answer.

In most cases, here is how they would know what white-label to load:

All requests use the same DocumentRoot and thus load the same files.

The included config file would determine the whitelabel based on domain name (as an example).

This variable is then used wherever it needs to generate or fetch content uniquely to that whitelabel (example in database queries, loading template sets, whatever).

Another idea is, yes, they very well could create a different virtualhost and documentroot per white label and automatically rewrite their virtualhost file when new white labels are generated, etc... for almost all cases though this is pretty inefficient.

Hope that helps you get started :)

One other tip is you can work out some pretty nice white labels which can hide their footprints (ie. remain pointed to your own server/IP, allowing you to add additional folders, web stats software, etc...) through setup and usage of mod_proxy or any equivalents for other webservers. That mostly requires cooperation on the program's end, however.

$_server["http_host"]

Sorry to bump this old ass thread but I'd like to hear more from anyone knowledgeable about how to create a white label system within an affiliate panel so that affiliates can simply generate their own white label at will.