I have seven wordpress sites and use WP Simple Firewall on all of them.

I’ve used other firewall plugins in the past. Most were a real pain – they were difficult to update, made site updates difficult, were complicated to set up and hard to uninstall. Some were expensive, and in the long run were too difficult to maintain.

The one firewall I really liked had not been updated for years, and apparently someone found a hole in it because I was hacked. Nothing obvious at first… just some footer links add to a site… then a virus was added… Google quickly took my site out of their listings… and at the same time my server started sending out tons of spam. I knew something was wrong and could see my server was sending out mail like crazy, but before I had a chance to figure out what was going wrong and how to fix it, my hosting company shut the server down. I had to rebuild everything (luckily had good backups, but still it was a pain and meant downtime).

So, after I set everything back up on a new server, it was obviously time for a new firewall.

I found and installed this plugin on one site, then after testing, rolled it out on all my sites without hesitation. The advantages are that it is:

1) easy – I could quickly and easily install it on all my individual sites.

2) no affect on site loading speed (I test speed regularly with pingdom).

3) options – the control panel gives me a lot of control over what it does.

4) frequent, easy, updates – the plugin author has been on the ball when it comes to keeping it up to date, and the updates are easy to apply. Can be automated.

5) audit trial and emails – I can easily look up and/or be automatically notified about whats going on, what’s being blocked, break-in attempts, plus reference when plugins were activated/deactivated, etc.

6) plugin author answers support posts – promptly.

7) great log in protection from brute force attacks, I get a lot of these.

8) seems to work great, no further break ins.

9) it’s FREE – more than that, it’s built, and the support is as if, it were an expensive premium plugin. But it’s free!