Flywheel Reviews

Developer-Friendly Managed WordPress Host with Premium Features

Flywheel caters to individual developers that want to set up their own websites and those that manage multiple clients. Though some Flywheel competitors offer more affordable plans, you’ll be getting great value for money — excellent resources, advanced features, and a ton of development tools are all part of the Flywheel offering we’ll be reviewing in detail below. 

No Uptime Guarantee but Solid Performance

While you won’t be getting any uptime guarantee, the host’s performance is impressive. Numerous Flywheel reviews by users confirm that the host’s uptime falls between 99.97% and 100%. Also, users reveal that it’s consistent even under intense loads. 

Good Speed & Performance

The server’s speed and load times are great. The cloud-based infrastructure backed by the Google Cloud Platform delivers a high-availability and full redundancy. On top of that, your site will be hosted on a VPS server. You’ll have a dedicated server with full access to manage it however you see fit. With all resources isolated from other servers, good performance is guaranteed. 

The Flywheel hosting is also highly scalable. It can handle huge traffic surges with no downtime or need to migrate to more hardware. Plus, the company has five data centers across North America, Europe, and Asia which means that you can host your website in the closest data center for top speed. 

Many Flywheel reviews further praise the platform’s industry-leading CDN provider powered by Fastly which enables global caching thanks to the multiple POPs. Also, this CDN offers full-page caching including the full HTML of the pages. The proprietary caching engine, FlyCache, works with the CDN to serve up cached content from global POPs, improving performance and making sure every user gets the same level of quality regardless of their location. 

Proprietary Dashboard

The proprietary Flywheel web hosting dashboard has a beautiful design with a sleek interface and easy-to-use functions that give you total control. From adding collaborators, managing admin privileges, making changes to the sites under your control, and uploading files — you’ll be in control of everything site-related. Though some Flywheel hosting reviews report the dashboard isn’t as feature-rich as cPanel, we would say it does the job great.  

Developer-Friendly Features

Trusted by more than 35,000 agencies and creative brands, Flywheel offers some unique features that make the job easier. 

Blueprints  

Blueprints is a unique feature that saves you time when building WordPress sites. When creating a blueprint of an existing site, themes, plugins, and other settings will be saved so you can use them for other sites. You can quickly apply the pre-configured settings through the Flywheel dashboard without any additional setup. Flywheel reviews deem this solution very practical — users say it saves time and simplifies recurring site projects. 

Cloning

Cloning is a fairly fresh Flywheel feature. Though it seems similar to Blueprints, Cloning enables you to make an exact copy of the entire website whereas with Blueprints you can only save the settings.

Staging 

Designed to aid developers, staging environments allow you to make a copy of your site, make changes, and apply them on your live website only when you’re happy with the work done. This feature is available with all plans — no plugins or a separate server needed. 

Free Site Migration

Migrating an existing site or sites to Flywheel is an easy and completely free process. You can opt to download the plugin and migrate the site by yourself following the detailed instructions. The other option is to let the Flywheel team handle the process within three business days. If you want to expedite it and have it done within eight business hours, you’ll have to pay $49 per site. The fact that we didn’t find a negative Flywheel hosting review about this service speaks volumes about how good it is. 

Robust Security & Nightly Backups

Flywheel implements advanced IP blocking to identify and block intruders. In case your site does get hacked, Flywheel’s team of experts will fix the problem for free. Also, Flywheel partners up with Sucuri to offer malware monitoring. Server- and site-level protection against brute force attacks, free SSL certificates, SFTP access, and automated core WordPress updates also make sure that your site is kept secure.

When it comes to backups, Flywheel brings its A-game. Thor backups run every night and are stored for 30 days. You can easily restore them with one click at any point. Another notable feature is the snapshot function. You can take a snapshot and then restore it when needed, without having to wait for the nightly backup.

Flywheel Support

The company promises support from real humans available 24/7 via live chat and in-app ticket. Flywheel reviews rave about the helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable team. Users report positive experiences with short waiting times. We particularly love that they use intercom which is an even better option than live chat since the widget is accessible from all pages and saves the chat history even if you accidentally close the window. 

The Flywheel customer service via phone is available only for plans above $250/month (Agency or Custom). For reference against competitors, a Flywheel vs SiteGround comparison, for example, gives extra points to the latter for its outstanding phone support available at all tiers. So, if phone support is your cup of tea, you might consider this alternative, unless you’re subscribing to the higher-tier Flywheel plans. 

Money-Back Guarantee Plus a Free Demo Site

Our Flywheel review can confirm that the vendor doesn’t lock you in with long-term contracts. You can cancel your subscription at any time but keep in mind that the account will remain active until the next billing cycle. If you opt for month-to-month payment, you’re eligible for a full refund within 72 hours of purchasing/renewing the plan. If you go with a yearly plan, you can get a full refund if you cancel within the first 30 days. 

In addition to the money-back guarantee, Flywheel offers a free demo site. This means you will be able to create a site, try out different features, and decide whether the web host is a good fit for you within 14 days without paying a dime.  

Flywheel Pricing

When comparing Flywheel vs WP Engine, you’ll find many similarities in their plans. This comes after both web hosting companies joined forces although they continue to operate as separate entities. Flywheel is slightly more affordable with plans starting at $15 per month. Though it’s quite limited, this plan will allow you to get started with premium managed WordPress hosting without breaking the bank. That said, Flywheel reviews reveal that users would love more pricing options especially for smaller websites that don’t require intensive hosting solutions. The Flywheel hosting costs meanwhile can be reduced by getting two months free when you sign up for an annual plan.

WordPress Managed Hosting

Except for Multisite which is only available with the Freelance, Agency, and Custom plans, the following platform features come with all plans:

• PHP 7.4 Ready
• FlyCache
• CDN (powered by Fastly)
• Simple SSL Certificates
• 30+ StudioPress Themes
• Genesis Framework
• Additional sites ($20/month/site)
• Global availability
• Auto-Healing Technology
• Third-Party SSL Certificates

Workflow tools are the same with regardless of the plan you opt for and include:

• Blueprints
• Organizations
• Billing Transfer
• Local Development Environment
• Staging Sites
• Free Demo Site
• Collaborators
• Nightly backups
• All-in-One SFTP
• SSH Gateway
• Site Cloning

Support-wise, free migrations and 24/7 chat support come with all plans. Agency and Custom subscriptions come with a migration dashboard, phone support, and a dedicated account manager. The Custom plan tops all of this with quarterly business reviews.

Overage Fees

As also indicated in Flywheel reviews, if you exceed the visitor or storage limits on your plan, the vendor will charge you an overage fee as follows: $1 per 1,000 visitors over the limit and $1 per 1GB over the limit. 

Add-Ons

In addition to the hosting plans, Flywheel also offers add-ons that can help you enhance your plan. With Performance Insights, you’ll get reports about the performance along with highlighted areas of improvement and recommendations. This add-on will cost you $25/month per account plus $7/month per additional site. 

Managed Plugin Updates will strengthen your site’s security by keeping it up-to-date. The plugins are thoroughly inspected and only the expert team proceeds with the update only after establishing everything is fine. This service will also cost you an additional $25/account/month plus $7 per additional site a month. 

The white label feature for reseller hosting enables you to brand the dashboard and support and bill under your brand. This will cost you an additional $99 a month. 

WordPress Reseller Hosting

The research for our Flywheel review showed that the vendor’s reseller hosting is known as the Agency Partner program. It comes with a dedicated account manager who will help you price the servers and sell them. The reseller program has two tiers: 

Silver — $0-$99/month through referrals or resale — supports freelancers and agencies. You’ll get 3X the first month’s payment, access to helpful resources for accelerating your revenue, early access to all Flywheel features, and marketing/sales assets.

Gold — $100-$1,449/month through referrals or re-sale — designed for small and medium-size agencies that manage multiple clients. On top of everything included in Silver, you’ll get account management, priority support, free hosting for your agency’s site, onboarding gifts, plus a listing on Flywheel’s Agency Partner Directory.

Our Verdict

Flywheel is a solid managed hosting provider with top-quality service especially if you build sites for clients. As confirmed by dozens of Flywheel reviews, there are many things to like about this host — powerful development tools, free CDN, custom caching, nightly backups, and free SSL certificates. Optimized for WordPress, it delivers blazing-fast speeds and keeps your site secure. As expected from a premium web host, Flywheel provides outstanding customer support too.

That said, this is a pricey host that it’s more suitable for growing websites than small ones. Also, there’s no email hosting and domain registration which means you’ll have to pay extra to a third-party provider.