Wow! I’ll give it a try. And perhaps I should switch to Godaddy, Liquid Web is no help. I asked of their “Managed WordPress Hosting” tech support if they had much familiarity with Wordfence. The answer was less than inspiring. What the heck is “Managed WordPress Hosting” anyhow? I’m beginning to see the phrase can mean about as much management as the asphalt on the street in front of your house. When it gets a pothole, they might fix it, eventually…
Thread Starter
kbonner
(@kristinebonner)
I thought that I was all set, and had another godaddy install, and it totally broke the other one! still working on it. have manually deleted the word fence and the wflogs, and site admin is all messed up. what a nightmare 🙁
Sheesh. I just spent 2 hours with Liquid Web hosting support. It appears they got it working, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed!! Check my other posting.
For what it’s worth, the same exact thing happened to us while working on these three sites. The tech got #1 working, then when he got #2 working it broke number one. He then seems to have gotten it all fixed, but it was not grade school server management.
The problem we had is that my VPS only has one global configuration for the PHP, which had to be broken down.
MTN
Thread Starter
kbonner
(@kristinebonner)
Okay my second site was having issues only because it was caching. Last night I left it at a stable state on the outside with word fence plugin removed and all the .waf code removed. But I couldn’t log into the admin. All kinds of errors displayed. This morning, all was fine, I installed word fence through the plugin interface, activated the firewall. I had to wait a little bit and all the sudden everything worked!
mountainguy2: Did you get this working with the Liqduiweb VPS? I’m having the same issue now. Do you know exactly what steps were taken to resolve this?
BigBugsy, apologies but I have just about zero recollection of what Liquid did as it was all stuff I didn’t understand other than on a basic level. I do recall that they had to do some tweaking of the server configuration files, and that the support technician really knew what they were doing once I was clear about what Wordfence messages and information I was getting.
They did not seem to be up-to-speed on Wordfence as a plugin, even though I pay for the so called “Managed WordPress Hosting,” which it turns out is actually somewhat of a crock, it’s just a VPS with the addition of Google Page Speed (which actually slowed down my sites, or had nearly zero benefit) and a bit of specific WordPress server configuration you can get from any Apache cookbook. Main thing was the technician I got did know what they were doing in a general sense, figured it out specific to Wordfence, and it had to be done for three different websites.
BTW, I’m not sure how necessary the Wordfence firewall really is to a site that’s already well protected and is careful about plugins. I’ve been running it now from when Wordfence first release it, and it has not blocked one thing, on three different websites, one of which is fairly high traffic. My point being, unless Liquid Web can get this done for you with minimal hassle, perhaps it’s best to just ignore.
Biggest concern for me was ending up with stuff done to the server that could break.
I’ll see if I can find the support chat thread somehow on Liquid, if so I’ll pull a few quotes for you.
MTN
Aha, I found something by searching WordPress.org with keywords “wordfence liquid firewall”
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/success-with-firewall-614?replies=2
I hope that helps, look like I made an effort to get some information out there, have no idea if it’s useful or not…
MTN
Thanks. The solution we found was to disable HHVM in order to get the Wordfence firewall working. I doubt it is worth the performance tradeoff though. Will have to do some testing..
Ok, please share results of testing with and without HHVM, I’m sure many folks using Liquid Web would like to see something more than just words about it from the people selling it as part of their server package. From what I gather in study HHVM is like a lot of these “performance enhancers” that are over sold. On the other hand, it sounds like for certain types of websites it can be excellent. MTN
