Some coders are doing a living from selling php scripts. Nothing new here. But to protect themselves from piracy they need to encode the php code to prevent stealing, unauthorized usage and so on.

This can be accomplished using various encoders, some strong , some weak that will give them a specific amount of security, depending on what each of them is doing, form simple obfuscation to byte encoding techniques.

Two major players are Zend Guard and Ioncube encoder.

If Zend has a wider spread across the hosting companies, ioncube is not that lucky, and usually you have to make a ticket to support to load the ioncube loader for you ( with or without a fee). There are cases when this cannot be done, so you might be forced to try to load this by yourself.

This can be accomplished if the ini flag enable_dl is ON – a quick phpinfo() should reveal this to you.

If you are lucky, next step is to download the loaders from ioncube site, upload it to your server and point the browser to

http://yoursite.com/path/ioncube-loader-helper.php?page=install-assistant

you will find something like this:

create a php.ini in the folder you need to put encoded files

and add this line to it

if you have the loader in the same folder, path woud be “./” else use the folder where you put the loader.

now point your browser to

http://yoursite.com/path/ioncube-loader-helper.php

and if all is ok you should have something like this:

Pretty simple, no ticket to support and no waiting for it to be solved.