Pascal

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

You can unpack it with winzip or 7-zip. I believe a tool like total commander can also unpack this file.

You can update monthly, there is an update each first Tuesday of the month.

If you do not want the hassle of updating you can also purchase an API key. In that case the checks are done on a server nearby. As it costs me money to run these servers there is a small yearly fee involved.