I'd like to protect a PHP app that a client wants to have hosted on their own servers - I know that Zend Guard & Ion Cube do some form of protection but i've also found sites that will reverse engineer this code.
My question is - is there a way to obfuscate the code first, then load it through the Zend Guard to give it a 'second layer' of protection.
Apart from the slowdown of performance of this site what other pros & cons could I expect if this is even at all possible?