Flywheel is one of the most well-known web hosting providers.But you will see that they have quite a good offering for Managed WordPress Hosting. But that is also all you get, as Flywheel exclusively offers Managed WordPress Hosting.
Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, Flywheel operates globally with more than 200 employees, including its considerable share of remote teams. It’s founders– Dusty, Tony, and Rick, are from a web design and development background and came together in 2012 to build a platform that simplifies WordPress hosting.
Let’s take a detailed look at Flywheel’s services.
A HONEST REVIEW OF FLYWHEEL WEB HOSTING.
Managed WordPress Hosting.
Flywheel’s Best Features.
Ease of Use.
Availability and Uptime.
Performance.
Security.
Pricing Plans.
Customer Support.
Flywheel only offers Managed WordPress hosting. It may seem odd, given that most of the other hosting services reviewed by us usually have at least the most obvious types of hosting like Shared, WordPress, VPS, and Dedicated.
If you are interested to know more about Flywheel and their mission to help WordPress developers, continue reading.
Flywheel hosting is fully optimized for WordPress from the ground up. Installation is simple and can be done with a few clicks through its intuitive Dashboard. More about that in a bit.
All of Flywheel’s Managed WordPress Hosting plans come with a free SSL, the latest version of PHP (7.4 as at the time of this article), managed plugin updates, performance benefits, and a host of features for web developers.
Web Hosting Plans.
Pricing plans are categorized with two plans each, for individual sites and web development agencies. The “Tiny” plan starts at $11.25/month for a single WordPress website with 5GB storage, 20GB bandwidth, and 5,000 monthly visits.
This pricing is somewhat higher than the competition, but Flywheel sweetens the deal with a full three months of free usage when you sign up for its Annual plans ($135.00/year).
Tiny Plan
The “Tiny” plan suits a relatively smaller website that does not expect much traffic, so it is more suitable for startups. But if you expect more than 5,000 visits a month or need more storage and/or bandwidth, the “Starter” plan offers a lot more, but at twice the cost ($22.50/month). The Annual discount applies here as well ($270.00/year).
If you are a freelancer or run a web development agency, then Flywheel has just the right plans for those types of needs. They are appropriately named “Freelance” and “Agency”, and are priced at $86.25/month and $217.50/month respectively. Again, the annual discount applies to these plans as well.
Freelance Plan.
The “Freelance” plan allows up to ten WordPress websites and provides more than sufficient bandwidth (200GB) and monthly visits (100,000/month), but with just 20GB of storage, you may be somewhat restricted. It’s the same with the “Agency” plan as well. It offers up to 30 WordPress websites and almost four times more bandwidth and monthly visits, but just 50GB storage.
Customer Plan.
Flywheel also offers a Custom pricing plan if you need more than 30 sites. All you need to do is contact them via a simple form, and the Flywheel team will get in touch with you with the relevant details and pricing.
You can learn more about Flywheel’s pricing on their website. If you need to host a WooCommerce enabled WordPress website, Flywheel provides custom plans starting at $75.00/month. You can learn more here.
Flywheel’s Best Features.
Now that the pricing is out of the way, we can get to the good part. The vision of Flywheel’s co-founders is literally to “improve the lives of the millions of web designers and developers worldwide that build sites on WordPress”.
This vision is quite evident with all the features provided, especially for developers.
Let’s take a detailed look at Flywheel’s services.
Managed WordPress Hosting
Flywheel only offers Managed WordPress hosting. It may seem odd, given that most of the other hosting services reviewed by us usually have at least the most obvious types of hosting like Shared, WordPress, VPS, and Dedicated.
If you are interested to know more about Flywheel and their mission to help WordPress developers, continue reading.
Flywheel hosting is fully optimized for WordPress from the ground up. Installation is simple and can be done with a few clicks through its intuitive Dashboard. More about that in a bit.
All of Flywheel’s Managed WordPress Hosting plans come with a free SSL, the latest version of PHP (7.4 as at the time of this article), managed plugin updates, performance benefits, and a host of features for web developers.
Web Hosting Plans.
Pricing plans are categorized with two plans each, for individual sites and web development agencies. The “Tiny” plan starts at $11.25/month for a single WordPress website with 5GB storage, 20GB bandwidth, and 5,000 monthly visits.
This pricing is somewhat higher than the competition, but Flywheel sweetens the deal with a full three months of free usage when you sign up for its Annual plans ($135.00/year).
Tiny Plan.
The “Tiny” plan suits a relatively smaller website that does not expect much traffic, so it is more suitable for startups. But if you expect more than 5,000 visits a month or need more storage and/or bandwidth, the “Starter” plan offers a lot more, but at twice the cost ($22.50/month). The Annual discount applies here as well ($270.00/year).
If you are a freelancer or run a web development agency, then Flywheel has just the right plans for those types of needs. They are appropriately named “Freelance” and “Agency”, and are priced at $86.25/month and $217.50/month respectively. Again, the annual discount applies to these plans as well.
Freelance Plan.
The “Freelance” plan allows up to ten WordPress websites and provides more than sufficient bandwidth (200GB) and monthly visits (100,000/month), but with just 20GB of storage, you may be somewhat restricted. It’s the same with the “Agency” plan as well. It offers up to 30 WordPress websites and almost four times more bandwidth and monthly visits, but just 50GB storage.
Customer Plan.
Flywheel also offers a Custom pricing plan if you need more than 30 sites. All you need to do is contact them via a simple form, and the Flywheel team will get in touch with you with the relevant details and pricing.
You can learn more about Flywheel’s pricing on their website. If you need to host a WooCommerce enabled WordPress website, Flywheel provides custom plans starting at $75.00/month. You can learn more here.
Flywheel’s Best Features.
Now that the pricing is out of the way, we can get to the good part. The vision of Flywheel’s co-founders is literally to “improve the lives of the millions of web designers and developers worldwide that build sites on WordPress”.
This vision is quite evident with all the features provided, especially for developers.
It all starts with Flywheel’s innovative and intuitive Dashboard. Creating a new site is as simple as clicking the “CREATE A NEW SITE” button at the top-left. Once you fill in a few details about the new website, Flywheel spins up your new WordPress website in minutes. All of your websites are then available on a single screen. Gone are the days when you needed to track dozens of credentials for your client’s websites.
Flywheel offers more than one development option for freelancers and agencies. If you prefer to have a local development environment, Flywheel provides you with Local – a local offline tool to do so. It allows you to share your development websites with collaborators and clients directly from your local environment with the app’s added security.
If you are more biased towards a Staging environment, Flywheel provides one with all of its plans, and you can transfer new changes to production with just a few clicks. The best part about it is that Flywheel gives you 15 days to create a website and then transfer billing to your client, once they have approved the website.
If you were looking for another type of hosting in this section, you’re out of luck. Flywheel exclusively provides Managed WordPress web hosting, but it does it really well. Let’s look at some of the other aspects you should consider before selecting Flywheel as your web hosting service.
Ease of Use.
In terms of user experience, Flywheel excels with its clean and modern User Interface (UI). Irrespective of whether you need to set up your WordPress website from scratch or migrate it with Flywheel’s free service (there are some caveats, more on that soon), the process is amazingly simple. Once your sites are set up, you will be able to control every aspect of them through a centralized dashboard.
The Flywheel team is ready to help you with your migrations and plugin updates, making your experience even more straightforward. You can also use the Flywheel Migrations plugin to migrate sites yourself. The availability of a Staging environment on all plans makes updating your website all the more convenient.
Availability and Uptime.
There are five data centers that you can select from when creating your website. These are spread across North America, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Europe.
Flywheel boasts a 99.99% uptime guarantee and has many features like its own server caching technology Flycache to ensure blazing fast page loading times. The partnership with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has improved Flywheel’s high-availability status.
Flycache is unique in comparison to other traditional caching services as it is specially designed for WordPress websites. Some of its salient features are that it intelligently excludes WordPress plugins while supporting the specific needs of e-commerce plugins like WooCommerce.
So your visitors won’t have any shopping cart issues due to incorrect caching. It also supports Smart Refreshing so that the latest version of your site is always displayed to visitors.
Try best wordpress hosting now.
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