Anyone else find ioncube a huge pain?    I appreciate the desire or need for a developer to want to protect their code but it's such a pain to get ioncube running on most hosts..    I have a client on BlueHost and while they have a "simple one click" install for ioncube, it's an old version... DOH!    So, back to square one and after fighting with it for an hour I manage to make it work. 

Honestly at this point when I see that a tool I'm interested in uses ioncube, I start looking for another tool...   Why penalize me for being the guy that is willing to pay for your stuff when the hacker is just going to find a way to steal it from you anyway?