Chris

This is the recommended solution from dreamhost. It’s a bit late tonight for myself to get stuck into the solution but I am posting this for anyone experiencing this issue with dreamhost.

Hello Christopher,

Thank you for reaching out to DreamHost support. I will be more than
happy to help you with your request.

I understand from your message that you need assistance as you are
currently getting several 418 erros. Usually, these errors are Mod Sec
errors blocking the process currently performed.

However, I have checked the error logs and I have added some exception
rules and ran some configs/updates on it. You should now be able to
proceed with the process mentioned and it should not generate these
errors. If by any chance it does, feel free to disable Mod Sec and try
again. You can follow the steps mentioned in this article for information
on how to disable it:

https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/215947927-How-do-I-enable-Extra-Web-Security-for-my-website-

I hope this information results useful, feel free to reply anytime should
you have any further questions or if you need additional assistance, I’d
be happy to help!

Please stay safe and healthy!

John H

@drawmyface thanks I have created a ticket I wll let you know how that goes. Thanks also for the plugin to make a page speed difference in wordpress

Also having this problem using neve WordPress theme.

Hello Rob. I was thinking of something I read once to blog spam you can block people searching for in url powered by wordpress and a few other questionable search terms. There was a plugin but that was around 2012. If anyone remembers such a plugin.

Here is what my host said I guess I can do nothing about it.

`Hello,

Thanks for writing in, your site is setup on a shared server.

It seems that the outside domain is being returned by the service you’re
using for that IP.

Please note there are hundred of domains setup on the same apache
instance:

apache2-pat.footprint.dreamhost.com

Please let me know if I misunderstood the issue.`

I created a ticked so I will see thanks for your interest @jnashhawkins