Pascal

I find it odd that the whitelisted ip address is on the list of most blocked (unless you whitelisted it after a couple of blocks already then it would make sense).

A 504 error is generally something a (reversed) proxy would give if the requested website has a very slow response time and the request eventually has a timeout. If the request would be blocked by the plugin this would be done in like for instance a second and would result in a different HTTP error code.

I don’t have a hostgator account myself so I cannot check what went wrong. But perhaps you can ask support what has changed

504 error is not something the plugin returns.

If 209.235.144.9 is on your whitelist for the frontend it should be okay. If not could you send me an export of your settings to the mail address listed in the plugin?

Your (I think Matomo?) code may be loaded before iQ Block Country can do it’s job.

Matomo or Google Analytics is not the best way to determine if a visitor actually got to see the whole page. You can check with your raw webserver logs if the request was denied or not from the logged HTTP code.

I see your webhost runs nginx. This may be used as a reversed proxy in front of your real website and in that case you might get a different IP address than your actual visitor. iQ Block Country tries to get the real IP address even if the visitor tries to hide it but in some cases it might fail. Really depended on the situation.

You may want to check with your webhosting provider what was changed at the date the plugin stopped giving the proper ip address.

As a work around you could create a symlink between the paid version name and the lite version. No code change necessary but you still get the latest database. (If your webhosting provider supports this)

From the FAQ

I have moved my WordPress site to another host. Now iQ Block Country cannot find the GeoIP databases anymore

Somewhere in your WordPress database there is a wp_options table. In the wp_options table is an option_name called ‘upload_path’.
There probably is an (old) path set as option_value. If you know your way around MySQL (via PHPMyAdmin for instance) you can empty the option_value.
This should fix your problem.
Please note that your wp_options table may be called differently depending on your installation choices