IonCube

IonCube Loader is a software instrument, that is necessary to run files that are encrypted with ionCube PHP Encoder. The aforementioned is an application designed to make PHP code human unreadable, so as to protect it from reverse engineering and illegal usage. Plenty of script-driven apps, particularly discussion forums, content management systems and e-commerce solutions are encrypted with ionCube PHP Encoder, therefore if you obtain a script and you find that ionCube is on the list of website hosting environment requirements, you need to ensure that your website hosting server has the tool pre-installed. While it is not that hard to install it when you have your own server, it is close to impossible to do that on a shared hosting server since the PHP environment should be precompiled and all the clients on the server will be affected.