Table of Contents
Flywheel review: Flywheel was started in 2012 by three web developer friends, Dusty, Tony, and Rick. After working in the industry, they knew how difficult it was to be the intermediary between a customer and a hosting service. Flywheel is designed to provide freelancers, agencies, and resellers with a platform that makes it easy to use a workflow-centric approach, involve clients in the process, and collaborate on a project. However, focusing on this specific customer group brings with it a lot of responsibility.
If you are a professional in this space, you require tools that help you work smarter and faster – not harder. For teams or agencies, these tools become even more critical. Here is our Flywheel review.
Getting started
Choosing a plan with Flywheel is an easy experience as they all stand side by side, along with their most prominent features. However, if you want to go into the smallest details, you can choose to compare all the features in a reasonably transparent way. You will get information about the platform’s functions, workflow tools, and support in a table where everything included in the plan is checked. At the bottom of the page, there is a related and handy FAQ section.
After selecting the desired plan (or creating a custom plan, which is always an option), you can continue making your account by providing your email address, choosing a username, and generating a password. To complete your profile, you will need to add further (although fairly regular) personal information and select a profile picture, if you wish. Alternatively, you can also sing with your Google Account.
As far as data centers are concerned, you can choose between five locations (USA, EU, UK, Canada, and Australia), but these are not further specified. It is important to note that if you choose an annual plan, you will get free hosting for two months, which can be a tempting offer.
As you will surely notice, the Flywheel’s dashboard is refreshingly beginner-friendly and straightforward, yet stylish and very pleasant to look at.
If you want to transfer an existing site (or some of them), you will get it for free and with the support of Flywheel’s team. All you have to do is fill out Flywheel’s secure migration form and wait for the support agents to transfer your site from your old hosting provider to Flywheel.
Flywheel uses its custom control panel, so it lacks several standardized features. However, it is intuitive enough and designed with the developers and designers in mind to make much difference to most users. The panel offers site tagging capabilities (useful for hosting multiple sites) and 2FA, a two-factor authentication. The WordPress installation is just a click away, so you can start editing the template and adding content to your site without delay.
Flywheel review: Performance
In terms of speed, the GTmetrix test of Flywheel’s main website produced less than successful results. This is surprising for a relatively respectable host, but Flywheel failed the test about several criteria. The time it took to load the page fully was as much as 19.6 seconds, more than double the average of 8.1. Besides, it took 213 requests instead of an average of 88, which is not something we can easily overlook. The flywheel promises an “impressive loading time on any site,” but the results achieved do not go well with that claim.
However, the uptime test that ran on Flywheel’s website for a month showed more encouraging results. No downtime was recorded at all, and only a few fluctuations in response time. Although Flywheel does not guarantee any uptime, the score of 100% is better than we expected and undoubtedly promising.
Flywheel review: Pricing and Plans
As Flywheel specializes in providing premium managed WordPress hosting services, prices are significantly higher than competing providers. The cheapest plan, Tiny, starts at $14 per month and is recommended for “small, simpler installations.” This will provide you with a WordPress site, 5GB disk, and 20GB bandwidth, which is quite decent. All plans come with SSL certificates, managed plugin updates, and performance insights, and if none of the proposed plans fit your needs, you are invited to create a custom-built one.
There is no free trial, but a money-back guarantee policy varies depending on whether you opt for a monthly or annual plan. If you opt for a monthly plan, you are entitled to a refund in the first 72 hours after your purchase. For a yearly plan, you have 30 days to decide whether Flywheel is a good option for you or not.
Flywheel review: Customer support
When it comes to supporting, Flywheel offers more than a few rather enthusiastic promises that start with a statement: “The perfect support software didn’t exist, so we built it ourselves! They describe their customer support as fast, helpful, and available 24/7/365, regardless of time zone or working hours. Moreover, in addition to expert advice, their agents are supposed to provide personalized human responses, rather than robotic auto-responses of questionable quality.
Instead of a more traditional knowledge base, they offer various self-help services: a help section, more than 30 free e-books, and lots of videos that deserve praise. In terms of contact methods for support and the live chat that is always available, they also offer help via email and telephone. Unfortunately, the latter is only available to customers who pay $250 or more per month.
Final words
Although Flywheel is one of the most expensive WordPress hosting alternatives in the business, there is no doubt that they provide a level of quality that is worth your money. If you are a web designer or developer who wants to create and manage multiple WordPress sites with ease, then you should take your chances with Flywheel. If not, both Bluehost and Hostgator are excellent alternatives.