For a long time I’ve been having trouble with some of my word press plugins. What they ended up having in common was that each of them like commentluv and entredroppers required my database to connect to an external RSS feed. So I worked with both the makers of these plugins and they checked them and they were set up correctly but we couldn’t work out why they were not working.

I took out a ticket with my host. Here’s the story I got:

We have a custom firewall and it will not allow access from external url’s. We need to add those urls in the firewall whitelist so that you can access them. Please note that most of the common urls are already included in the whitelist and I have reconfigured this now. Could you please check again and let us know the external urls that are needed to whitelist, if the issue still persists so that we can add that to the file.

So I contacted each of the plugin makers again and they gave me the URLs I needed and my host placed them on the firewall whitelist and they work.
Hooray! It wasn’t me afterall.