Flywheel Review: Everything You Need to Know in 2022
$13 / mo.
- Easy website management
- One-click wordpress site staging
- Daily data backups
- Top-tier security
- Decent customer support
- Backed by Google cloud infrastructure
While Flywheel is an authoritative name in the web hosting space, it’s not as popular as its competitors like Kinsta and WPEngine. But putting the fame aside, is Flywheel a good solution for secure and reliable managed WordPress hosting? That we’ll find out in this guide.
For instance, this article will walk you through Flywheel’s performance in crucial WordPress aspects like server dependability, infrastructure, pricing, and customer support. This way, you’ll know whether or not Flywheel is the right choice for you. That said, let’s dive in.
Flywheel: Quick Overview
Flywheel is a managed WordPress hosting provider that came out back in 2012. It’s based in Omaha, Nebraska, in the United States, and carries the mission of improving the lives of millions of web developers and web designers around the world. Flywheel plans on doing so by helping them build great projects on the WordPress platform.
Like Kinsta and WPEngine, Flywheel is backed by the highly reliable and protected infrastructure of Google Cloud to get you a great deal of dependability. It’s among the top reasons why websites hosted on Flywheel generally offer a decent loading performance and a great server uptime.
Apart from that, managed hosting at Flywheel means your WordPress server and websites will be managed by Flywheel’s team itself. This way, you won’t need to manage your server updates, configuration, and other technical aspects on your own. Instead, Flywheel’s experts will ensure your server and site are working well.
Moreover, Flywheel offers a variety of collaboration features to make it a perfect fit for freelancers and agencies who create and manage websites for their clients. If you’re a freelancer or an agency yourself, you’ll love exploring these features of Flywheel.
Flywheel Review : Pros
Here we’ll look into the top advantages of Flywheel’s managed WordPress hosting.
Easy Website Management
As mentioned, Flywheel is designed for freelancers and agencies to serve their clients flawlessly via its platform. That’s why it provides a user-friendly interface for managing your account and websites.
The best thing about Flywheel’s dashboard is its collaboration features. It lets you add your team to your Flywheel account and define their roles so that only qualified people can access sensitive details. Moreover, you can access all your WordPress projects from a single dashboard for convenience.
Other than that, Flywheel’s setup process is also pretty great. It only takes a few minutes to create your account and set up your first WordPress project. On top of that, you get to either create a website from scratch or use a demo website and customize it further.
One-Click WordPress Site Staging
Another great benefit of Flywheel’s managed WordPress hosting is the support for a staging environment. This feature lets you test your website’s appearance, functionality, and other aspects before bringing it live. Flywheel lets you stage your WordPress project within a single click so you can fix any bugs before they affect any user.
Daily Data Backups
In this modern era where viruses and attackers are everywhere, protecting your site’s data can be tough. If you want to ensure your site data remains safe and protected, data backups are the best possible solution. Thankfully, Flywheel gets that and includes free daily nightly backups with all its plans.
Flywheel’s backup tool automatically creates a copy of your site data and stores it in a safe cloud server. So, if an unfortunate data loss event occurs in the future, you’ll be able to restore the backup to recover your site data.
Top-Tier Security
Flywheel is a highly secure hosting solution to ensure the websites you host are highly protected. Firstly, Flywheel uses advanced data encryption in its infrastructure so no one can break into your data. Also, your communication with your team or clients across its platform is encrypted as well.
Moreover, all plans at Flywheel include SSL certification so your websites are protected from hackers. The security features like SSH access, user role management, and two-factor authorization are also some great additions.
Another decent security feature of Flywheel is regular software and hardware patches that ensure top-tier protection of your data. On top of that, you don’t have to configure or manage these updates on your own; instead, Flywheel’s team does all of this for you.
Decent Customer Support
Flywheel’s customer support is one of the finest ones on the internet. You can access its support service through multiple channels, including email, phone, live chat, and social media. We went ahead and tested its live chat support, which is available 24/7.
In our experience, the response time of Flywheel’s customer support was pretty fast as we got a response within a few minutes. Most importantly, Flywheel’s support representative was knowledgeable and friendly, which led to a decent customer support experience overall.
Other than that, Flywheel also offers a detailed knowledge base containing over a hundred in-depth tutorials for your help. The best part is, that these tutorials are equipped with screenshots and descriptive photos to class up your self-service experience.
WordPress-Optimized Services
As a WordPress hosting provider, Flywheel’s services are optimized for WordPress in many ways. Firstly, all the servers deployed using Flywheel’s platform are configured with WordPress in mind for top-tier compatibility and performance. Plus, Flywheel offers managed WordPress updates so your WordPress version and themes, and plugins are always up-to-date.
On top of that, Flywheel’s support team and knowledge base are also backed by WordPress experts to help you quickly solve your issues. Moreover, you can develop a WordPress site from your Flywheel dashboard within clicks, as it offers a one-click WordPress install feature.
Backed By Google Cloud Infrastructure
Google Cloud is among the most trusted and dependable cloud infrastructures available around the world. In fact, Google claims all its cloud servers are backed by the same infrastructure that its apps like Youtube are based on. This means you’ll enjoy the same level of reliability and performance when getting WordPress hosting from Flywheel.
A key feature of Google Cloud infrastructure is auto-healing technology which ensures your website keeps running even when your server hardware misbehaves. Flywheel also offers a custom caching technology to class up the performance of your Google Cloud-backed website. Moreover, all servers launched at Flywheel use CDN to provide worldwide visitors with exceptional page loading speeds.
Fantastic Loading Speeds
As Flywheel is backed by the Google Cloud infrastructure, the websites hosted on it tend to boast lightning-fast loading speeds, with the average speed falling around two seconds. This ensures your visitors enjoy a good user experience and don’t bounce off due to the slow loading of your site.
Another significant feature of Flywheel is the choice of various data center locations, as the Google Cloud platform is widespread worldwide. These locations include the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Having the choice of the server location means you can pick one that is nearest to your target audience. This way, most of your site visitors will enjoy a blazing-fast page loading experience, increasing your chances of converting them.
Amazing Server Uptime
Whether you’ll be hosting your own site or your client’s, you’ll want it to be available 24/7 for it to be successful. Having your website accessible round-the-clock requires a hosting service with a decent uptime score. As Flywheel is based on the Google Cloud platform, it has been able to maintain a terrific server uptime over time.
In our tests, Flywheel maintained a consistent 100% uptime, translating to zero downtime. Among the main reasons Flywheel boasts such an uptime is because Google Cloud’s infrastructure uses auto-healing technology to ensure your site keeps working even when the server hardware misbehaves.
Flywheel Review : Cons
Here we’ll look into the main downsides of Flywheel.
The Pricing is a Bit Steep
As a premium WordPress hosting provider, Flywheel is a bit pricey. By looking at the hardware resources and other essential features you get with Flywheel, it instantly looks overpriced. Like, you can certainly find a WordPress host that provides more hardware juice for the same price.
But if you look closer, you’ll notice that the reason for Flywheel’s high pricing is not just its hosting service, but the collaboration tools, security, and infrastructure you get with it.
For instance, Flywheel is backed by one of the most trusted cloud platforms on the market, Google Cloud. As you might expect, that makes hosting incredibly high-performance and secure. Apart from that, the collaboration features like automated communication and client management make Flywheel worth the price, depending upon what you want from it.
Doesn’t Offer Domain Registration
Many popular hosting providers like Bluehost, HostGator, and Hostinger offer domain registration services for the convenience of their users. But unfortunately, you cannot register a domain name at Flywheel. Instead, you’ll need to buy the domain name from a third-party service and connect it to your Flywheel account.
Lacks Email Hosting
Another important service that is unavailable at Flywheel is email hosting. Whether you’ll be hosting blogs or eCommerce shops, you’ll need professional email accounts for business communications. But you cannot avail of the email accounts at Flywheel, like a domain name.
Anyway, we’d recommend you pick a third-party service that offers domain registration as well as email hosting for these two services if you go with Flywheel.
Flywheel Pricing
Here we’ll take a close look at Flywheel’s managed WordPress and growth suite plans.
Managed WordPress Hosting
Here are the pricing details of managed WordPress hosting at Flywheel:
TINY | STARTER | FREELANCE | AGENCY | |
Monthly pricing | $15 | $30 | $115 | $290 |
Annual pricing | $13/m | $25/mo | $96/mo | $242/mo |
Monthly visitors | 5,000 | 25,000 | 100,000 | 400,000 |
Storage | 5 GB | 10 GB | 20 GB | 50 GB |
Bandwitch | 20 GB | 50 GB | 200 GB | 500 GB |
Growth Suite Plans
Flywheel also offers Growth Suite plans for freelancers and agencies to provide them with all the collaboration tools they need to serve their clients at their best.
FREELANCE | AGENCY | |
Monthly pricing | $135 | $330 |
Annual pricing | $113/mo | $275/mo |
Monthly visitors | 100,000 | 400,000 |
Storage | 20 GB | 50 GB |
Bandwitch | 200 GB | 500 GB |
Added Ecommerce Features
WP Engine’s eCommerce plans come with some extra features in addition to the regular WordPress hosting features, like:
- 90% more caching for better site performance
- Live Cart to provide a stable cart for WooCommerce
- One-click online shop creation
- Optimized store theme for a good user experience for visitors
- WooCommerce website templates
- Automated plugin updates
Apart from that, the last three WooCommerce plans of WP Engine also include instant store search.
People Also Asked
Is Flywheel hosting good?
Flywheel is among the finest managed WordPress hosting providers on the market. It has helped thousands of freelancers and agencies serve their clients at their best to date. Though Flywheel’s pricing is a bit sharp, it offers lots of collaboration, workspace, and client management features to make up for that.
Is Flywheel shared hosting?
Flywheel is backed by the Google Cloud Platform and uses cloud servers. These are a special type of VPS servers that are connected using the cloud infrastructure, leading to consistent server uptime and top-tier reliability. VPS servers are virtually private, such that the user gets dedicated server resources for unparalleled performance and improved privacy.
Does Flywheel use cPanel?
Unlike most hosting providers, Flywheel doesn’t offer cPanel. Instead, you get a custom control panel at Flywheel that’s specialized for WordPress users, as they’re the target market of Flywheel. Though it lacks some of the functionalities cPanel offers, its features are sufficient for WordPress developers and designers.
Final Words
In this guide, we explored how well Flywheel performs in terms of reliability, customer support, performance, and other crucial aspects.
To conclude, it’s a decent managed WordPress hosting provider offering a variety of bells and whistles. Though Flywheel’s pricing is not that affordable, it’s a perfect solution for freelancers and agencies looking to serve their clients in a modern-day and automated manner.