[bigredseo]

I'll throw my hat in the ring too and say that the IonCube should be loaded as part of the system and not necessary to call directly in your own custom php.ini file. It's also possible that they've swapped to a system that no longer recognizes the php.ini file but does allow settings to be set from within an .htaccess file (they'd have more details on that if they did).

If they prohibit it alltogether, and they don't want to add IonCube to their main system configuration, you can maybe ask them to manually create a php.ini for you with the settings. The file could be set as a ROOT user, or a setting to prevent editing so that you can't make edits, but the system will still recognize the file. This way they can review the content of the file themselves and approve it.

Aside from that, there shouldn't be a reason that they're preventing the creation of a php.ini file. If the system is secured correctly there's nothing wrong with using a custom php.ini and locking down sections that users can't overwrite.