Good, but resources are unacceptable

I have a love-hate relationship with Wordfence. On the positive side it has helped protect me from annoying bots, scrapers, and even one DDoS attack. Unfortunately I’ve had to uninstall Wordfence ever since it began crashing my site. My host and I have made multiple attempts to allocate enough resources, but whatever Wordfence is doing it’s crashed my site maybe 10 times. I’ve verified this with my host.

In each case WordFence will eat up all my server’s CPU usage, temporarily bringing the site down. CPU usage routinely drops. I’ve tried removing rules that looked at hostnames (as this supposedly slows it down), increasing PHP limits, and deactivating certain features like live traffic.

Maybe this always happens on a server with cloud hosting. Maybe it’s that Wordfence doesn’t play well with multiple levels of caching. Either way, it’s costing me actual money in slowing the site down.

In the end I’m sad, because I actually paid for premium for features like two-factor authentication. I’ve really liked being able to see who’s accessing my site too much. But any benefit I’ve gained in terms of saving bandwidth has been undermined by Wordfence’s pure bulk in terms of resource usage.