DANGEROUS Plug In! Server crashed constantly.

We installed this a couple months ago on 35 sites. Randomly, sites would crash and we’d see that the .htaccess files were HUGE. Every site that I kept seeing at the top of the process list had a huge htaccess file with all kinds of URL rewriting rules and massive IP blocklists. I guess they have just been getting bigger and bigger, and it seemed the plugin wasn’t even creating them correctly as hundreds of lines were being duplicated over and over.

This caused thousands of php processes to run and soon, the server was crashing almost hourly. We finally figured this out. I did send a message to the developer that the .htaccess files were not right.

If you are a host and your sites are crashing and your server, too… this could be why. Just wanted to put this up in case this happens to you. Haven’t seen any issues with Wordfence so far.