WHMCS Windows 64-bit

Hello WHMCS and its community,

I did some research and found that the required IonCube Loader does not exist in 64-bit for Windows. This tells me that WHMCS will not work with 64-bit Apache and 64-bit PHP, is that correct?

And as I can see, IonCube Loader only exist for PHP 5.4, not the latest 5.5?

Can I run WHMCS without IonCube Loader, or is that not recommended? Perhaps an alternative?

Best regards,
Thomas