[Plugin: EWWW Image Optimizer] Resolving Hosts Errors

Hi, Whenever I activate this plugin I start to have Resolving Hosts errors in my Dashboard and with anything that communicates back and forth with my site. Akismet won’t work, Google API’s won’t work, Twitter API’s, etc. I have tried all of the normally recommended things: deactivating plugins, reactivating one by one, a manual re-install of WordPress, emptying of W3TC caches, deactivating W3TC. When I deactivate EWWW and empty the wp-transients cache the problem disappears and everything is back to normal. I am on shared hosting at HostGater and I have contacted them about increasing the rate limit on my site which they did and the problem still returns when I activate EWWW. The errors are:

Download failed. Couldn’t resolve host ‘downloads.www.remarpro.com’

RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: Couldn’t resolve host ‘www.remarpro.com’

Any help would be greatly appreciated because I really like this plugin and want to be able to continue using it.