Online Licensing - Frequently Asked Questions

License Files

How are licenses named
How does license expiry work
What are license property defaults
What are passphrases
Can I restrict licenses by MAC address
Can I edit licenses
What are demo licenses

Subscription Plans

What are license tokens
How do payments work

Misc

What are projects, variants and versions
What are users
What timezone do you use
Can I trial the service with the evaluation version of the ionCube Encoder

License Files

Q. How are licenses named
A. You will be asked to set the license name when creating a project and this can be edited afterwards. License files that have expired will have an '_expired' suffix. Downloads of multiple licenses will be in the form of a zip file and will contain one folder for each license. The folder name is the license number displayed in the online licensing portal.

Q. How does license expiry work
A. For licenses that expire after a certain duration, the base date is the UTC creation time of the license. This means that the license validity period begins from when the license was created. Licenses that expire that are set to expire on a certain date will do so at 00:00:00 UTC on the date selected.

Q. What are license property defaults
A. These can be set at the project level and are used to populate the license properties input when on the create license page, and can be edited before the license is created. Once a license is created, its license properties cannot be changed.

Q. What are passphrases
A. All license files are created with a passphrase. License files only work with php files that were encoded using the same passphrase. In the ionCube Encoder GUI, the php file passphrase is set in the Restrictions tab in the Project Settings window.

When you download a license file, its passphrase depends on the project, variant and version settings.
If no variant or version passphrase is set, the project passphrase will be used.
If a variant passphrase is set but not a version passphrase, the variant passphrase will be used.
If a version passphrase is set, it takes priority and will be used.
You can also set a passphrase specific to a variant and version combination. This combination passphrase overrides the version passphrase.
After a license is downloaded for the first time, all future downloads of the same license will use the same passphrase.

Q. Can I restrict licenses by MAC address
A. This option is only available if your account holds a license to any version of the ionCube Encoder Cerberus Edition.

Q. Can I edit licenses
A. You cannot make changes to license properties, server restrictions and expiry once the license has been created. When a license is downloaded for the first time, the passphrase used will be taken from the project/variant/version setting, and all subsequent downloads will use the same passphrase. You are able to edit project level settings to expose server restrictions or to expose the expiry time and these settings will be used for every download.

Q. What are demo licenses
A. A demo version of a license can be downloaded that can be tested with files encoded with your paid ionCube Encoder. You will not be charged a license token for these but they will expire after a maximum of six hours. All subsequent demo downloads of the same license will expire at the same time.

Subscription Plans

Q. What are license tokens
A. Downloading a license file will charge your account one license token. Multiple downloads of the same license file do not use additional tokens. Your subscription plan provides a certain number of license tokens and these renew every month. You can purchase top-up tokens if you require more license tokens. These do not expire and are used only when you do not have any other tokens remaining. Downloading a license as a demo does not consume a token.

Q. How do payments work
A. When setting up your subscription, enabling auto-renew in the checkout page will let us capture your payments automatically. If your subscription is set to auto-renew, payments will be initiated at 01:00:00 UK time on the day of your renewal, and you will have access to your next set of license tokens later that day. If your plan does not auto-renew, an order will be automatically created and you must login to complete payment. You can also login within ten days of your renewal to pay for the next month. The first payment for all susbcriptions requires admin approval but future payments are automatically approved.

Misc

Q. What are projects, variants and versions
A. Projects, variants and versions let you organise your licenses, and allow you to create licenses with common settings. When creating a license, you can choose which project, variant and version to create it under.

Q. What are users
A. You can create users with their server restrictions which will populate the server restrictions input when creating a license. This provides a convenient way to create multiple licenses for any end-users that you give licenses to. In the projects view, this also gives you a quick indication to which user a license belongs to and the expiry status of the license.

Q. What timezone do you use
A. License expiries and all dates shown within the licensing portal are in the UTC timezone.

Q. Can I trial the service with the evaluation version of the ionCube Encoder
A. You can use all features of the service but licenses that you download will be created with the evaluation version of the ionCube license maker and these expire after a maximum of 36 hours. In addition, these licenses are only compatible with encoded files produced by the evaluation version of the ionCube Encoder.