Does anybody have any figures for what percentage of hosts support Zend encoded files or Ioncube encoded files or SourceGuardian encoded files?

Basically here are the questions:

What percentage of hosts have the Zend encoder support already installed?
What percentage of hosts either have Ioncube support installed or allow dynamic loading (dl function)?
What percentage of hosts allow dynamic loading (for supporting SourceGuardian)?

Does anybody have a list or know of any of the major hosting providers that don't support any of these platforms?

I found out that Yahoo does not support Zend-encoded files or Ioncube encoded files. Does BIG HOSTING COMPANY XXX NOT support Zend or Ioncube?

If you have some numbers please post. If you know of a BIG host that does NOT support one or more of the platforms please post.

I've got to start offering a demo version of my software and need to decide on an encoder platform before I decide on a licensing method to implement.

Thanks

Yahoo does there own thing. I would expect mosts hosts support both Zend & Ioncube considering that both Zend & Ioncube are used by so many products.

The fact Yahoo doesn't isn't surprising. They tend to not support a lot of things that customers would have, which is why so many people switch off there hosting when there needs become a little robust.

We've found that it's roughly equal between those who have installed Zend Optimizer and those who have the ionCube loaders. The way around it is to offer both options to your customers.

Olate,

Thanks for the input.

I was hoping to settle on just one so I could just create one licensing scheme (plus save some money). I guess in the world there is Coke and Pepsi and it's best to offer both (even though Pepsi is better).

Yes indeed. Our recommendation is always to go with the ionCube encoder, for a number of reasons including support, better GUI and faster performance. But if you can provide both then you might as well give customers the option.

In my experience, the number of hosts with Zend Optimiser installer is much higher than those with the ionCube loaders installed in the php.ini file. Overall though, due to the run-time loading, ionCube probably has a greater chance of working.

The flip side is, when neither work out the box (Zend not installed, ioncube runtime loading won't work), on cPanel there is a nice one line SSH script to install Zend Optimiser (/scripts/installzendopt) so most hosts can install it very easily without much fuss. ionCube on the other hand requires a more manual procedure - for those who haven't installed either before, it is slightly more daunting than the one-line command and nice text-based install.

Certainly, recently, I have seen an increase in the number of hosts with dl() and other functions ionCube needs disabled. It still however makes up a tiny percentage of installs and something I wouldn’t worry myself over.

As David (Olate) said, getting both is probably the best option. Also, don’t forget the Zend Small business discount at 40% off - $600/yr vs $1000/yr is quite a big difference :)

Hi again Jon :) Glad you posted over here as suggested; it's the best place.

Just to pick up on points that Alasdair mentioned, whilst there is no shell based install as we prefer not to have scripts that tinker with install files and create ones in their own locations as Zend does, the php.ini install process (which is just a one line edit) is of course documented, and there is a helper script that users can run that tells them what file to edit and what line to add. This lets the user keep their original php.ini file, and tells them what to do. It's very rare for us to get enquiries from someone about how to edit their php.ini file, and if we do, then we can assist of course.

The runtime install is perhaps a mixed blessing as had we not had that feature then hosts would need to have installed the Loader in the php.ini file. As we did add the feature, which has been a big hit, hosts supporting the feature via dl() never know that they support Loaders as they have never been asked because they run out of the box, and so fewer have the Loader in the php.ini file.

Something that we did see a few weeks ago which unfortuntately we cannot substantiate because we didn't take a screenshot, was a site offering both Zend and ionCube downloads for a particular product that had received several times the number of unique downloads for the ionCube version than Zend. They were suprised as were we (they now only offer ionCube downloads btw.), and it was an interesting result.