FlyWheel Review 2019 - Quality, Speed, Price and Comparison

Positioning themselves as a premium WordPress hosting company built specifically for designers, freelancers and creative agencies, Flywheel has a LOT to offer that can’t — at least as far as I know — be found elsewhere. We’re talking stuff like the ability to create free demo sites, an array of handy tools allowing multiple designers to work on the same site before it’s launched and — perhaps best of all: client billing transfer. That’s right — you can create a site for someone else on your own account and then, whenever you’re ready, transfer the account/billing for the site to the client!

KEY FEATURES

• A good suite of WordPress-specific (and security) options.
• Great support service.
• Fast, stable performance.
• Multiple advanced features for freelancers and agencies.
• Tuned for WordPress (as you’d expect), with server-side caching 
• A beautifully designed interface
• Free migrations
• Nginx as standard (inherently faster than Apache)
• All clients are on VPS — not shared — servers!
• No overage charges
• Client billing transfer
• One-click staging sites
• Free demo sites (only pay when sites go live!)
• Solid security & malware monitoring
• Great performance 
• Nightly backups stored off-site and one-click restores
• Easy CDN integrations
• Impressive uptime
• Upgrade, downgrade plans anytime
• Reimagined SFTP
• Simple collaboration tools
• A single dashboard
• Built in site stats
• A choice of ten server locations
• Free Let’s Encrypt site security certificates
• Payable by PayPal (no credit card required)

Managed WordPress hosting typically provides a better experience than shared platforms. It’s definitely an option to consider if your budget can stretch accordingly – the only question is which managed hosting provider to pick. To help you in this endeavor, here’s our Flywheel review for WordPress.

Flywheel is one of the most popular WordPress managed hosting providers available, and it’s easy to see why. They offer a fantastic set of features for both regular WordPress users and agencies – but are they a good pick for your unique needs?

In this article, we’ll go over Flywheel’s WordPress-specific features, how their support team fares, performance benchmarks, and pricing information. Let’s get this Flywheel review for WordPress on the road!

Flywheel review for WordPress – specific features

Aside from their WordPress managed hosting features, Flywheel is known for its extensive suite of tools for freelancers and agencies. If you’re looking for a web host that can help you grow your web development or design business, you definitely should consider them.

However, for the purposes of this review, we’re going to focus on WordPress-specific features. Here’s what Flywheel has to offer in that respect:

• Optimized dashboard: Instead of a clunky cPanel, you get access to a streamlined dashboard for WordPress sites.
• One-click staging sites: Test changes on your WordPress sites using staging technology.
• Nightly backups: Flywheel backs up your WordPress sites nightly, for increased peace of mind.
• Hands-on security: Protecting your site from malware and attacks is taken care of, removing the need to install security plugins.

Overall, Flywheel lives up to its reputation with a comprehensive set of WordPress features. Let’s see if that quality translates to support as well.

Support options

When it comes to support, Flywheel doesn’t disappoint. They offer several channels of communication, including plain email tickets, phone calls, social media, and live chat. For our Flywheel review for WordPress, we decided to test their live chat, since that’s the channel most people tend to use.

All in all, we had a very pleasant experience. We waited for less than a minute for a support specialist to connect with us, and they answered our WordPress questions promptly and in-depth:

As far as documentation goes, Flywheel provides its users with over 100 articles covering everything from WordPress-specific issues to billing questions. Chances are you’ll find what you need in there without even having to contact a specialist.

Performance

As a managed WordPress web host, Flywheel takes performance seriously. That becomes clear when perusing the tools they offer:

• WordPress optimization: Since Flywheel only hosts WordPress sites, they’ve fine-tuned their servers for it.
• Custom caching engine: They offer a custom caching solution built with WordPress users in mind.
• Free Content Delivery Network (CDN): A partnership with MaxCDN enables Flywheel to deliver enhanced load speed.

To top things off, Flywheel offers server availability throughout the world, including the following locations:

• in the US: New York, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco
• Singapore
• Tokyo, Japan
• Toronto, Canada
• Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Frankfurt, Germany
• London, United Kingdom

That collection of features and server locations sounds great on paper, but does it translate into positive real-life results? Let’s find out.

Page speed tests with Pingdom

For our first round of testing, we used Pingdom to measure page speed loading times from three different servers:

• Melbourne: 2.20 seconds
• New York: 0.59 seconds
• Stockholm: 1.36 seconds

Our test website is located on Flywheel’s New York servers, hence the discrepancy between test results. All in all, these are decent test results, except for Melbourne, as anything over two seconds tends to be problematic. Now let’s see how the website fares under a more thorough test.

Basic load testing with Load Impact

When it comes to performance, figuring out how a website fares under pressure is often more revealing than a simple speed test. Any site can load relatively fast with some optimization, but only high-quality web hosts provide comparable speeds under stress. Here’s how Flywheel fared with up to 25 concurrent users loading the site:

• Load Generator: Ashburn, USA
• Test Server: Ashburn, USA
• Minimum Response Time: 0.15 seconds.
• Maximum Response Time: 1.19 seconds.

Aside from a single spike, Flywheel held steady at under 0.2 seconds during the entire stress test. That’s a fantastic result, which places this web host near the top of the pile when it comes to WordPress performance.

Pricing

Flywheel’s plans cater to both business owners and freelancers (with an emphasis on agencies). They offer a wide range of offerings, but for this review, we’ll focus on their Pay-per-Site plans:

• Tiny ($15 per month): This plan supports up to 5,000 monthly visits and is perfect for small personal websites and blogs.
• Personal ($30 per month): The Personal plan is good for up to 25,000 visits per month and is an excellent choice for small to medium service sites or online stores.
• Professional ($75 per month): The Professional tier can handle up to 100,000 monthly visits. It’s a reliable option for popular blogs and established eCommerce sites.

All the plans we mentioned above only support a single WordPress site each. They are expensive, as far as WordPress hosting goes, but in exchange for their price tags, they offer a great quality of service and little need for micromanagement. If you want your site to run at top form at all times and can pay for the service, you should definitely consider Flywheel.