IonCube Loader is a tool, that's needed to run files which are encrypted with ionCube PHP Encoder. The latter is an application designed to make PHP code human unreadable, as a way to protect it from reverse engineering and illegal use. Plenty of script-driven apps, especially forums, cms and e-commerce solutions are protected with ionCube PHP Encoder, which means that if you buy a script and you notice that ionCube is one of the web hosting environment prerequisites, you should make sure that your hosting server has the instrument pre-installed. While it's not that hard to install it if you have your own server, it is almost impossible to do that on a shared hosting server as the PHP environment should be precompiled and all of the clients on the server will be affected.

IonCube in Shared Web Hosting

IonCube Loader comes with all of the shared web hosting packages that we provide, so every time you need it to install and run some script application that needs it, you can enable it with a single click inside the Advanced area of the Hepsia Control Panel. As you can switch the PHP release which is active for your account from the same section, you will have to enable the instrument for every new version that you set. If you are more skillful, you're able to employ a php.ini file in a domain or subdomain folder and set the PHP version as well as the status of ionCube Loader for this particular site only, without affecting the whole account. In this way you will be able to operate both new and older script applications for multiple websites within the same account - a thing that you will not be able to do with a lot of other web hosting suppliers on the market.