Is it worth to make clones ?

While browsing various projects, I noticed lots of clone requests. I have my own opinion about site cloning. I want to share it with you. Maybe you will find something useful in this article.

I believe there are webmasters who really would like to create a site similar to another site. I mean site functionality and principles, and not the design. Sometimes I want it, too. It`s not a problem to get unique website design nowadays. Much more problematic is software question. Clone should be at least the same functionality as the original site, ideally should be even better. Here appear several problems.

Firstly, web surfer cannot discover absolutely complete site functionality. How can user discover about administration area possibilities and functionality? He cannot imagine the traffic site receives. So exact clone is hardly possible. I mean a technical side. The problem is, that usual programmer rarely works on the high traffic projects. Most of the sites would become much slower, or even stuck, if it will get 1000 users online. That`s because server resources usage. Usually sites uses database now. So extremely important things are the right queries to database, database design itself, indexes. Programmer should experiment with your own servers to see server and resources loads. Using right indexes decreases loads dramatically. The right queries also decrease resource usage, which is vital for high traffic websites. Ideal programmer at this point could be system administrator and programmer.

Secondly, server architecture is a very important thing, too. Don`t even dream to have a huge traffic site on a shared hosting account. 50 000 unique hits per month is not a huge traffic website. With wise software you should handle such traffic on shared hosting. VPS may be quite good solution as well. At least, at very least you should have a dedicated server if you have a huge traffic. Server configuration is vital, too.
You decide how many web server threads to run, what module to compile. Of course, you should compile only modules you really need. We reduce resource usage that way. You decide database server configuration. How much memory to use? How effective configuration is. Database server can show many aspects of optimization, like index usage, key reads, table scanning, opened tables, buffer sizes etc.

The third thing I want to talk is content. If you decided to clone site, most likely you plan to clone content, too. I don`t think it`s a good way out. Content is the king of your site. Content duplication is the worst thing you can do with a site. You will never get good ratings with content duplication. This information can be found in google webmasters section. Anyway, unique content is not a biggest problem in site cloning. Cloning google often means, that search results are fetched from google, and not your website, and just shown on your website. According to google TOS, it is illegal. Also, why I should search within your website, if you steal results from google? Google is much more stable and reliable site, so I prefer to search google.
Create your own search database, then! And one gold rule: make your site for users, not for google. This is a real way to top of the SERPs. Think, if you would make your project, if there was no google.

Now after you have read my short thoughts about all that think: is it really make a clone of youtube or google, or bbc or similar sites for a price of 50$? I suppose, before accepting such bid for a clone, you should consult with an expert. Otherwise you risk to "buy" a stolen or nulled script, and sooner or later you will meet legal issues.

And finally, for smaller sites you can get quite good clone, anyway you should check functionality and quality of the work you are intended to buy.