I’m using InfinityFree free hosting with WordPress and Rank Math SEO. After resubmitting my sitemap a few days ago, my sitemap (/sitemap_index.xml) worked even yesterday, but today it never finishes loading again — the PHP script seems to hang. Google Search Console still shows the sitemap as successfully submitted. I’ve regenerated permalinks, cleared caches, and disabled other plugins, but it still doesn’t load.
Could this be a server-side PHP memory or timeout limitation on InfinityFree?
Additionally, when testing the site from different geo locations using a VPN, I always get a 403 Forbidden error for certain locations. Is this something I can configure on my side, or does InfinityFree block VPN access in general?
InfinityFree don’t block VPN access in general, Seems strange that you’d be getting the 403. Are there specific pages that show it most often? and have you installed any security plugins that might be blocking it?
Thanks for checking! I noticed that the 403 only happens when I use a VPN — I was just trying to see how the site appears in Google searches from different states or regions and I forgot to turn it off. Without the VPN, both the sitemap and the site load fine.
I’m also using Cloudflare, so I’m guessing it might be their security rules blocking some VPN/proxy IPs rather than InfinityFree itself. Does that sound about right?
It’s likely that the VPN IP address was blocked on our end. We have automated checks in place to detect abuse traffic and block bad IP addresses. It’s possible that someone used the same VPN server to do bad stuff, which resulted in the IP address being blocked.
That’s just a risk of using a VPN I think. The privacy protections it offers are often abused to hide malicious activity.
Thanks. I understand that shared VPN IPs can get blocked due to abuse from other users or sometimes simply when more traffic comes from the same IP than usual.
Does banning IP addresses really help? I would have thought attackers can easily rotate VPNs and that banning a shared vpn only hurts legitimate users.
Not using a VPN isn’t always a solution either—when you’re traveling, you often get blocked just for not using your home IP (see Google/Gmail).
Do you have any recommended way to test a website or Google search from different geo-locations without triggering these kinds of blocks?
The goal is not to ban VPNs, the goal is to ban bad IP addresses. Your VPN is not banned because it’s a VPN, it’s because someone used that VPN to do bad stuff. Other VPN providers and other servers from the same provider might not be banned.
I don’t have access to the numbers, but from what I’ve been told, these measures are quite effective at blocking attacks. Yes, they are not that effective at true, large scale DDoS attacks, but there is a very large volume of much smaller attacks that are blocked very effectively by this system.
What are you looking to find out exactly by trying to access it from VPNs in different locations?
You cannot assess performance this way because the overhead of the VPN, and any blocks are always as the network or provider level, and so a VPN in a datacenter isn’t representative as a regular user on a consumer ISP.
And you can still run Google searches over the VPN (although strongly doubt that GeoIP is the determining factor for search results), you can still see which pages are available and how they are ranked for certain keywords, even if you cannot click the links to actually access the pages while using the VPN.
To my understanding IP bans on InfinityFree’s server because of malicious traffic are generally temporary. Many people don’t have a static IP address nowadays, so even if an IP doesn’t belong to a VPN server, permanent IP bans could still stop someone innocent from accessing a site.
