After several months of hesitation, I guess it was about time to perform a major upgrade on the PHP engine for the NeoHide site. As my hosting server, BlueHost, purely supports both PHP 4 and PHP 5, and it was highly recommended that the latter is relatively more advanced and provides a better performance, it was undoubtedly a very much sooner or later approach to be taken.
From the control panel of my hosting server, it was a straight-forward procedure to perform the upgrade, just within a click of a button. A screen-shot was taken and shown on the left.
However, before I actually perform the upgrade, a backup is nevertheless required just in case things do go wrong. It was easy to perform the backup, directly from the BlueHost cPanel (see screenshot below).
Once again, it was quite a straight-forward procedure to perform the backup using the cPanel. The PHP 5 option was activated after the backup of the hosting server is completed. Everything went pretty smooth and fine. I was definitely glad.
BlueHost also provides two additional options, or rather features, for its members; that is, the IonCube and SourceGuardian. The descriptions of both functions are given below:
The ionCube PHP Accelerator is an easily installed PHP Zend engine extension that provides a PHP cache, and is capable of delivering a substantial acceleration of PHP scripts without requiring any script changes, loss of dynamic content, or other application compromises.
SourceGuardian is the only serious choice for protecting and encrypting your PHP source code assets. With flexibility that other products only dream of – Professional developers everywhere are using SourceGuardian products to distribute their scripts safely.
It was relatively easy to install the scripts. I could use the pre-installed command to install the script automatically into the php.ini file, or alternatively, do it manually. The latter was chosen, so that I have clear control of what is going to be modified in the file. Voila! All went fine and well, so we now do have a site that is clearly optimised for PHP 5. You would probably see the performance improvement as well as a much secured environment.
Regards,
Keith Neo
NeoHide CEO
UPDATES: I realised that SourceGuardian was causing some errors within PHP; eventually, I have it removed from the site just today (April 6, 2008). Nonetheless, IonCube is still operational and running to ensure that the site is highly optimised.
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