I've used the free version of Wordfence…
I've used the free version of Wordfence off and on in the past and was motivated to upgrade to Premium as my traffic from African countries inexplicably skyrocketed and it was clear we needed to secure our website from potential hacks. The Premium version of Wordfence has been highly effective for enabling us to control where traffic comes from and block potential hackers. Most recently we have had multiple daily intrusion attempts from Texas that appeared to be from Google crawlers, which we DO want (I even asked Google's AI who said the IP's were Google crawlers), but when I contacted WF Support they responded quickly and identified the source as hacking attempts using Google's cloud server, which we don't want. I was concerned that the setting to "Allow Google crawlers" wasn't working but turns out it was working to block attempts to appear like a Google crawler. What began as many headaches trying to secure our website has become easy and almost effortless and I really appreciate the awesome Premium support which is worth every penny. Thanks Wordfence!