IonCube Loader is a software tool, that's necessary to run files that are encoded with ionCube PHP Encoder. The latter is an app designed to make PHP code human unreadable, as a way to protect it from reverse engineering or illegal usage. A number of script-driven apps, in particular community forums, cms and e-commerce solutions are protected with ionCube PHP Encoder, so if you get a script and you find that ionCube is one of the hosting environment requirements, you should make sure that your website hosting server has the instrument pre-installed. Although it's not that difficult to install it when you have your own server, it is close to impossible to do that on a shared hosting server because the PHP environment will have to be precompiled and all the clients on the server will be affected.
IonCube in Shared Hosting
IonCube Loader is a part of all of the web servers that are a part of our cloud website hosting platform, so irrespective of the shared hosting that you get during the signup process, you can enable it from the Hepsia Control Panel. This process is as easy as right-clicking an On/Off button in the Advanced section, so even if this will be your first website hosting account ever, you will not have to do anything complex. The exact same section enables you to select the PHP version for your account (4, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2), which means that if you choose to move to a different version, you only need to activate ionCube Loader for it as well. Since our platform is really flexible, you can set a different PHP version and another status of ionCube by using a php.ini file in every domain folder. If this is something you need to do but you do not have much experience, the 24/7 support team will be able to help you within minutes.
IonCube in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you get a semi-dedicated server package from our company, you'll be able to use any kind of script-driven application which needs ionCube Loader as the software tool is available on all servers that are a part of our innovative cloud hosting platform. We also support various releases of PHP, which means that if you move from PHP 4, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, for example, you can activate ionCube for this particular version with only a click in your Hepsia Control Panel. Our platform will remember your decision, and in case you switch back to the previous release of PHP, the tool will already be active. For more experienced users, we also provide the option to pick the PHP version and if ionCube will be active or not for a particular domain without altering the settings for the whole website hosting account. This is done by putting a php.ini file within a domain folder with a couple of lines of code.