Flywheel Review for WordPress: A Reliable Managed Host?

Managed WordPress hosting often offers a better experience than shared platforms. Considering whether your budget can scale accordingly is definitely an option – the only question is which managed to host provider to choose. To help you with that effort, here is our Flywheel WordPress review.

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

In this article, we’ll cover Flywheel’s WordPress-specific features, how their support team fares, performance benchmarks, and pricing information. !

WordPress Flywheel Review – Specific Features 

In addition to their managed WordPress hosting capabilities, Flywheel is also known for its extensive suite of tools for freelancers, designers, developers, and agencies. If you’re looking for a web host that can help you grow your web development or design business, you should definitely consider them.

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

• Optimized Dashboard : Instead of the clunky cPanel, you get access to a streamlined dashboard for your WordPress site .
• One-Click Staging Sites: Test changes on your WordPress site using the staging environment .
• Nightly Backups: Flywheel backs up your WordPress site nightly for extra peace of mind.
• Hands-on Security: Protect your website from malware and attacks without installing security plugins.
• No need for manual installation : Flywheel’s blueprint tool packages some commonly used themes and plugins into reusable configurations to automatically install them on new sites.

Overall, Flywheel has earned its reputation with a comprehensive WordPress feature set. Let’s see if that quality translates into support as well.

support options 

In terms of support, Flywheel doesn’t disappoint. They offer multiple communication channels, including regular 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 less than a minute for a support specialist to contact us, and they answered our WordPress questions quickly and comprehensively:

As far as documentation goes, Flywheel provides users with over 100 articles covering everything from WordPress-specific questions to billing issues. Chances are you’ll find what you need there without even needing to contact an expert. But if you don’t, take advantage of their 24/7 global in-app support today.

performance 

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

• WordPress Optimization : Since Flywheel only hosts WordPress sites, they have fine-tuned their servers for this.
• Custom Caching Engines : They offer custom caching solutions built just for WordPress users.
• Free Content Delivery Network (CDN): Partnership with Fastly enables Flywheel to provide higher loading speeds.
• Powerful Infrastructure : Flywheel also cooperates with the Google Cloud platform for strong performance.

Best of all, Flywheel offers server availability worldwide, including the following locations:

• United States: New York, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco
• Singapore
• Tokyo, Japan
• Canada Toronto
• Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Frankfurt, Germany
• London, UK

The 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 ​​Test Using Pingdom

In our first round of testing, we used Pingdom to measure page load speeds from three different servers:

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

Our test site was hosted on Flywheel’s New York server, so there were discrepancies between the test results. All in all, these are pretty good, except for Melbourne, where anything over two seconds is questionable. Now, let’s see how the site fared under a more thorough test.

Basic load testing with load effects

When it comes to performance, figuring out how your site performs under stress is often more revealing than a simple speed test. Any website can load relatively quickly with some optimization, but only a high-quality web host can deliver comparable speeds under pressure. Here’s how Flywheel performed 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.

With the exception of a single peak, the Flywheel remained stable at under 0.2 seconds throughout the stress test. This is a fantastic result, and it places this web host near the top of the heap when it comes to WordPress performance.

Use our Managed Monitor for uptime

In order to provide you with the best website performance, the server must be up and running efficiently 24/7. For example, if a hosting service claims to offer 99% uptime, it will be down for 14 minutes per day.

Luckily, Flywheel offers 100% uptime to keep your website available to your visitors.

pricing 

Flywheel’s program caters to business owners and freelancers (with an emphasis on agencies). They offer a wide range of products, but in this review we’ll focus on their pay-per-site plans:

• TINY ($15 per month): This plan supports up to 5,000 visits per month and is good for portfolio websites.
• STARTER ($30 per month): This plan supports up to 25,000 visits per month and is perfect for freelancers, small websites, and personal blogs.
• Freelancer ($115 per month): With up to 1,000,000 visits per month, the Freelancer plan is a great option for a mid-sized service website or online store. You can use it to create ten sites.
• Proxy (  $290 per month): The proxy tier can handle up to 5,000,000 visits per month. It’s a solid choice for popular bloggers and established eCommerce sites. It will allow you to build more than 30 websites.

The first two plans we mentioned above only support a single WordPress site. As far as WordPress hosting goes, they’re not very expensive, and in exchange for their price tag, they offer a high quality service with very little micro-management. If you want your website to always run in top form and you can pay for the service, then you should definitely consider Flywheel.

Overall Pros and Cons 

Before we wrap up our WordPress Flywheel review, let’s take a final look at the pros and cons of this web host.

advantage

A nice set of WordPress-specific (and security) options.

Great support service.

Fast, consistent performance.

Offers several advanced features for freelancers and agencies.

shortcoming

The price tag is higher than some competitors, especially if you wish to host multiple sites.

in conclusion