Encode Your Plugin – 3 Services You Should Know About

Like we discussed in a previous “Do You Need to Encode Your Plugins? Pros / Cons”
there are reasons for encoding your plugin and there are other reasons to release the code as open source.

If after you have weighed all the reasons you have have decided to encode you plugin here are 3 services for that make you life easier.

ZendGuard

ZendGaurd is part of Zend studio and it very robust encoding software that will be to protect your code being distributed freely.

If you choose to use ZendGuard to encode you plugin you will a well known encoding platform that many servers (not all) support. The big disadvantage of the ZendGuard platform it’s price which is very high and in most cases does not suitable for small projects.

IonCube

Like zendGuard IonCube encoding require loaders that need to be installed on your servers.

This loaders help the PHP engine to understand the encoded code and run.  Most modern servers have this loader already installed but you can still find some shared hosting compainies that does not support IonCube on their server.

When you selling your product in most cases you don’t really know what hosting environment does you client have.

IonCube price start from 100$ per license but you can encode files and pay as you using their online encoder.

You can try the IonCube online encoder

ByteRun

ByteRun – unlike the first 2 this service will not encrypt your plugin but as it will only scramble the code so a regular human high will not be able to understand.

ByteRun method is very effective because it does not  require any loader which your code will work on all hosting environments. You can encode you file for free using the free only encoder found inside the ByteRun website.

Just enter your email address and get a free token that will expired after few hours in this time you can encode as many files as want.

Bare in mind that the free online encoder is not the full encoding that supplied by the full Byte encoder software but on the other hand you can buy the software because ByteRun company has stopped to sell it.

If your plugin is using a lot of PHP files that this process can be time consuming as you will need to encode each file separately.

Conclusion

Every encoding that you choose eventuality could be broken.  choose the right solution that suitable for you price and budget.

Which Services Should You Use?

The final decision is always going to be yours and it will only depend on your needs.

We are using the ByteRun the encoding because we know that no matter which solution we will choose if someone want to break and hack the code he will find a a way.

We have chosen to use the ByteRun method because we want their not matter what hosting environment our client use the plugin will work with and loader or interruption.