Do I understand the situation correctly if I outlined it this way?:

You sell a desktop app (single user, maybe multiuser) from your website. At setup or first start of your app you want it to connect to some table/server on your website and store user information, so you know how many installs are made. Perhaps you even create a serial number or license, but mainly your app works with a local vfp database, that usertable you speak of is just registration information or even just a setup count, right?

Your webserver is based on linux? Or is it a windows server? If your website is hosted in a windows server you may deploy a webservice created from vfp with the help of the soap toolkit, if you want to follow Thomas idea.
If it's a linux server you still can deploy a webservice, but it must be based on something available there, eg php. That may be a steep learning courve just to count installations. SPT to mysql or whatever just takes sqlstringconnect(), sqlexec() and sqldisconnect(), quite simple.

Bye, Olaf.