How can I enhance the user experience of this situation in PHP
<p>OK, here is a little bit of background:</p>

<p>I developed a PHP application that I am going to offer free trials of through a custom control panel. The user will register on the control panel, and review/decide the level of the product they want to have a trial of.</p>

<p>Once decided they active the trial which does the following:</p>

<ol>
<li>Create a folder for the trial as a subfolder of a subdomain.</li>
<li>Create the database</li>
<li>Create a database user, and assign privileges</li>
<li>Create the database structure, and insert default values. (This is the longest step, and is done with a .sql file.</li>
<li>Updates some records in the database, like setting up the random default password.</li>
<li>Extracts a tar.gz file into the folder from step 1. This creates about 35 mb of files, but seems to be much faster than the sql script.</li>
<li>Updates the configuration files to use the new database, db user, and to point to the folder location that was created in step one.</li>
<li>Emails the new client with all of the details that they need to connect and get started using the application.</li>
</ol>

<p>The tests I have run so far seem to take on average 10 seconds to complete all of the steps above on my local machine, and it is taking about 6 seconds on my vps server.</p>

<p>I was thinking about dumping the details to a config file and processing it with cron, but I am hesitant to do that because there are multiple php variables that I am using during the process that I would have to dump to the file.</p>

<p>Any idea how I could handle this situation best?</p>
