Do you know about Flywheel’s WordPress hosting? Perhaps Flywheel has been recommended to you by a designer or agency owner seeking for a web host for a client. Or perhaps you’ve just discovered Flywheel after searching for “Managed WordPress Hosting” on Google.
If so, you should read this article! We’ve been hosting this website with Flywheel for a while, and in order to gather more real-world data, we’ve also spun up some new test sites on a new account. We’ve also taken a brand-new, in-depth look at all of the various things Flywheel has to offer in order to provide you a comprehensive, fair, and impartial assessment of their services, including the most current change to their hosting infrastructure’s use of the Google Cloud Platform.
We’ll discuss Flywheel’s benefits and drawbacks, price, what makes them unique from other managed WordPress web hosting providers, what sort of loading speeds (using two very distinct and well-liked WordPress themes) and uptime levels you can anticipate from them, as well as their pricing in more detail below. Additionally, to give you an idea of how Flywheel operates in actual scenarios, we’ll examine how these loading times are impacted when several visitors are accessing sites hosted by Flywheel.
I’ll go through both the standard features that Flywheel hosting offers as well as a few of its special features that can help you construct WordPress websites faster.
You should absolutely look into those features because Flywheel works very hard to set itself apart from many other WordPress providers.
Flywheel WordPress Hosting Features
By providing a variety of services that make life easier for web designers and developers, Flywheel stands apart from the majority of other managed WordPress hosting businesses. Additionally, these functionalities are contained in a chic, user-friendly design.
- Automatic updates For you, Flywheel automatically refreshes the core of WordPress.
- Automatic backups Every night, Flywheel backs up your website. Additionally, you can click a few times to quickly restore a backup and view snapshots of each backup. Backup plugins are not required.
- Easy staging sites Flywheel makes it simple to establish a staging version of your site, in addition to some other useful development capabilities that I’ll discuss in the following section.
- Built-in Varnish caching engine Without the use of a caching plugin, Flywheel uses server-side caching to make your WordPress site load rapidly.
- Free SSL certificate On each of its plans, Flywheel provides a free Let’sEncrypt SSL certificate. It only requires a few clicks to install.
- WordPress-specific security Without the use of a third-party security plugin, Flywheel integrates limited login attempts, IP blocking, Sucuri, and other features to keep your site secure.
- Free malware removal Flywheel will address any issues with your site for free if they arise.
- 10 different data centers In order to select a data center close to your visitors, Flywheel offers 10 distinct data centers located across North America, Europe, and Asia.
- 24/7 expert WordPress support Use the phone, email, or live chat to contact support anytime you need it.
Flywheel not only offers safe, high-performance managed WordPress hosting, but they also make it incredibly simple to set up private demo websites so that your clients can see a sneak peek of the design and development work you’ve done for them. This is a really eye-catching feature. Additionally, there are a few useful tools that automate and streamline web hosting bills for your clients, making it easier to transfer over websites to them, which web designers and developers will undoubtedly love.
If you’re looking for a web host that understands your demands as a designer or developer, reading this Flywheel review is well worth your time. We’ll go over the most crucial features in further detail.
Key Flywheel WordPress Hosting Features
Here are our opinions on the best aspects of Flywheel before we get to the results of the site speed and load handling tests.
Flywheel Cloud Platform
In order to transform Flywheel into a true cloud hosting provider, they recently improved their hosting infrastructure and joined forces with the Google Cloud Platform. The resources currently available to Flywheel clients’ websites can scale virtually instantaneously and without restriction, leading to quicker loading times and a more stable hosting environment. This is one of the key advantages.
Benefits of Cloud Hosting
A website is kept on a physical server with preset resources, such as predetermined quantities of memory, storage, and processing power, when standard hosting is used. via contrast, a single cloud environment is created by connecting numerous computers together via cloud hosting.
More Resources for your Website
Your website is hosted on one of these virtual servers, which are part of the cloud, which is made up of several real computers. The memory and processing power accessible to the virtual server are drawn from all of the computers in the cloud network, in contrast to a physical server’s fixed resources. Flywheel uses the Google Cloud Platform, one of the largest service providers, so your website has access to practically limitless resources.
Easy Workflows For Teams And Clients
Flywheel’s team and client processes are actually only useful if you’re running an agency that works with clients, in contrast to the previous two capabilities, which are useful even if you’re simply a regular WordPress user.
These qualities include the following:
- Organizations Make a project management tool and organisational profile that includes your complete team.
- Easy Collaboration Invite more team members to collaborate on projects without revealing passwords.
- Billing Transfer Once you’ve finished working on the client’s site, you can easily pass Flywheel billing to them.
Faster Loading Times
When using conventional hosting, your website may outgrow the actual server it is housed on, leading to performance problems like poor loading times or outages. Once this issue is identified, moving to a server with higher specifications can resolve it, but doing so may cause downtime and other problems when your website and its contents are migrated.
If the popularity and size of your website keep increasing, you might need to upgrade and relocate once more. However, with cloud hosting, depending on how the platform is set up, the resources accessible to your website are scaled automatically or at the press of a button. As a result, sudden increases in traffic or a gradual increase in the number of visitors can be readily handled without slowing the page down.
Less Downtime
Improved redundancy is a benefit of cloud hosting as well. Because your website is housed on a network of servers, the cloud network will continue to operate even if one server goes down. As opposed to cloud hosting, traditional hosting causes your website to go down if the server it is hosted on goes down.
Not all changes to the Flywheel hosting infrastructure have been made since switching to the Google Cloud Platform. Flywheel has also updated their caching technology to provide the WordPress websites they host with improved performance.
You can now host your WordPress website on the same infrastructure that Google uses for its end-user products using the Flywheel Cloud Platform, while still managing your website and hosting account through the user-friendly Flywheel dashboard, thanks to this upgrade and partnership with Google.
You can check out the loading times and traffic spike handling of our test sites hosted on the new Cloud Platform later in our Flywheel evaluation.
Should You Choose Flywheel Hosting?
I believe Flywheel hosting is a fantastic choice if you create WordPress websites for clients. It offers a tonne of distinctive features that will help you save time and simplify your life. Even better, Flywheel offers you those advantages at a reasonable cost.
The choice is a little trickier if you’re a normal WordPress user (i.e., you don’t construct sites for clients). The market for managed WordPress hosting at Flywheel’s price point has recently become much more competitive, even though some of Flywheel’s distinctive features are still useful.
