Plugin fails with host migrations

I host my site on a Dreampress host and I’ve been using this plugin for years with success and I was super comfy given the plugin is “Brought to you DreamHost.”

However a couple of weeks ago Dreamhost initiated a migration of my site to another server. Ever since then my site has been really slow when post updates have been performed (ie whenever wp_insert_post() is called). AJAX calls and routines would stall for ~30 seconds.

After hours and hours debugging my code (custom plugin) it turns out this plugin caused the problem! When you specify a custom IP, and that IP no longer exists, the plugin stalls presumably because it’s trying to connect to the old specified IP.

Suggested improvements:
1) The plugin should detect this and spit out an error (to errors.log or ideally to admin console) if proxy connections are taking too long. I’m guessing it does a check when you first set an IP but perhaps it should do a more regular check.

2) Dreamhost operational processes should be modified given the plugin comes from Dreamhost! If Dreamhost choose to migrate someones site, they should check for the existence of this plugin, and either update the custom ip to suit the new host or perform some alternate remediation before migrating and breaking the site.

I trust implementing both of these will go a long way to keeping a site operational and be well received by Dreamhost customers.