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I've developped a php script and I want to protect my files, so what do you think is the best choice for doing this.
Is there any other cheaper tools or even free ?
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Zend Guard is the most comprehensive solution combining excellent code protection with a flexible licensing administration system. Zend Guard protects commercial PHP applications from reverse engineering, unauthorized customization, unlicensed use, and redistribution.
ionCube was created in 2002, and gave developers tools to protect software written in the PHP programming language from being viewed, edited and ran on unlicensed computers. The tools use a technique of compiling the bytecode prior to encoding so that the source code is eliminated, and runtime overheads are reduced.
Not very secure, but you can use it for avoiding outside interference. I will say it's less than 50% secure out of 100%. There are plenty of tools on the Internet for partially decompiling older versions of ionCube. I recommend you to choose some other encryption tools for protecting your code.
Zend Guard Loader is an extension that makes it possible to use PHP files encoded with Zend Guard, a tool used by some proprietary PHP applications to protect access to the app's source code. Currently, Zend Guard Loader only supports PHP 5.5 and 5.6. It does not yet support PHP 7.0 and no longer supports PHP 5.4.
No amount of obfuscation will protect your files. If they are sufficiently popular, someone will decode them and distribute the versions that don't need IonCube or Zend to decode.
DRM won't stop piracy, but it will get in the way of your paying customers. You'll limit your potential customer base to those that can run the loaders to decrypt your software, which is a much smaller pool of people than all people with PHP web hosting. You'll also vastly increase your customer support load as you help people install the loaders and troubleshoot why your software won't run.
Most importantly, by creating this extra work and frustration for customers, and by preventing them from customizing their copies of the script, you'll lower their happiness with your product. That will result in less referrals, less positive reviews on blogs and social media, and in the end, less sales for you.
The best thing you can do to protect your files AND your sales is to not use DRM. Protect your business by offering incentives to be a legitimate customer, like technical support, free minor version upgrades, customer only discussion forums, etc. Not only will these make it desirable to purchase the script from you instead of download it from a pirate without those benefits, but it'll make your customers happier and more likely to spread the word, leading to more customers.
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for both zend and ioncube there are services that decode them, but these softwares latest versions are very expensive to decode like 125 euro for 25 files . this is more than the price of script itself .so you don't need to worry much about it and can easily use either zend or ioncube (I use ioncube).
@dan : I had a script that I was giving free support for life with a very low price and with a lot of features,guess what? somebody stole the code and they spread it all over the internet after that all my customers started calling me about it,kinda were upset that they paid,even though they were getting support... long story short ... trust me encoding your script and forcing people to certain hosts is way way better than your script being shared on internet for free by some dorks. and about not loading on their hosts,I have made a file that test either ioncube is installed on the server or not,and I give this file to them before they buy my script to test it on their server.
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