It is ok

Hi @wagenbachmj,

My name’s Dave, I’m a WordPress Developer at Bluehost. I agree the folks at Wordfence are great and we have plenty of customers that use Wordfence without issues.

I’d love to get to the bottom of this! If you wouldn’t mind sending me the domain you’re having trouble with Wordfence on at the link below, I’d be happy to take a look at the account and make sure our support team is giving you the best information.

https://daveryan.blog/contact/

@dryanpress is awesome and hopefully he will be able able to assist you. I think he might have said when I asked him he was waiting on information when we discussed this but don’t quote me on that. If you have any questions to ask us have Dave cc [email protected] and let me know by responding here.

Tim

Update — I am not surprised at the level of commitment of Wordfence and Bluehost to want their products to work. Although, I struggle, yet, with the Tier 3 support still wanting to shut off the plugin, I would not want to leave my review here without giving WordFence a fair shake.

Their support is always available and good. When I set up Wordfence firewall, I do not allow anyone outside the US, Canada, and Mexico to see the front end. I don’t do extended international business and I preferred to keep my website available to my more local customers.

The challenge this presents is the first level bluehost support is primarily from India if I am not mistaken, so they will often comment when I receive support is that WordFence has “broken” our website when I all actuality, the support in India is blocked from the front end. They want to disable WordFence.

Now, when I receive support, I have a standard line informing them that WordFence is really working fine and they are currently blocked from the front end and they accept that ok.

Here is my suggestion. If Wordfence would work with the various large WordPress hosts like Bluehost that have international support lines, they could retrieve the IP addresses of each host support and those IP addresses could be whitelisted.

I am trying not to make my review a support issue with WordFence, but mostly wanted to share with the community that they are worthy to work with. Security does come at a cost of convenience at times.

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by wagenbachmj.
• This reply was modified 5 years ago by wagenbachmj.

Thanks for those thoughts.

Unfortunately, opening every Wordfence protected site up to a list of IPs that might change at any given time is not a very secure option. The better course of action might be for you to unblock India before calling support. I trust Bluehost and have confirmed that the 1st level reps are full time employees. However, IPs change from time to time and it isn’t a good idea to whitelist tons of them in case the customer has blocked the IPs for some reason. It’s a case of being more cautious than not.

Just so I understand the initial review though, was Wordfence breaking the site or were the support reps in India just thinking it was? I wanted to be sure if there was an issue where Wordfence broke the site that we were looking into that. I wasn’t sure why you had to talk to them in the first place.

Tim