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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.