Here’s a well detailed review of Flywheel Hosting.
The trends of managed WordPress hosting, irrefutably, have skyrocketed among WordPress users over time.
From the likes of siteground Managed WordPress hosting to that of Wp Engine and Convesio as well.
Well, it’s obvious the advantages It has over the usual web hosting are pretty much significant.
But, where the problem tends to lie now, is choosing the right managed WordPress hosting provider.
In a recent article, we had made a crushing detailed review on the rumored best-managed WordPress hosting, convesio.
In Today’s article, we’ll be dealing profusely with another managed WordPress hosting provider, Flywheel hosting.
So without much ados, let’s get this review started.
First of all, It would be a no-good one if we would just hop in straight to this review without clarifying things.
To make sure we’re on the same page, let’s take things a little bit back and break in some terminologies.
What exactly is Managed WordPress Hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting is a web hosting format where all technical aspects of handling WordPress sites are covered by the hosting provider.
Ever wanted to be stocked at home, resting day in day out, with servants at your service getting basic work done for you? – that’s the feeling Managed WordPress Hosting gives.
It is dedicated specifically to WordPress and as a result, it provides automated handlings for all WordPress hosting related issues
WordPress managed hosting is quite expensive but they seem to be worth the extra fees allotted.
On Using them, you’re guaranteed Blazing fast speed, top-notch security, daily support from WordPress experts, Daily Backups, Automatic WordPress upgrade, and high uptime.
But this is just the basics of what most managed hosting providers would offer.
And that’s the reason, you should take your time to review these hosting providers.
Preferably, you can check out our list of hosting reviews on our tag, Hosting Reviews.
Contents
Flywheel Hosting
Founded way back in 2012 by a quartet, Flywheel is a hosting provider that is dedicated to providing a seamless hosting experience for WordPress users.
The company is a product of the popular hosting company, Wp Engine. Their cheap but unique solutions come in handy with lots of features and tools which can be useful to any online sector you find yourself in.
Whether you’re a freelancer, graphic designer, web developer, or blogger, if you really want to browse through the amazing features of WordPress managed to host and beyond, then you should try considering Flywheel.
Flywheel places focus solely on WordPress hosting – And that’s the reason it tends to stand out of the crowd– Email hosting services, Domain services, e-commerce tools, website builder features are all excluded from their product.
This might sound like a limitation to many users who are probably native hosting-based users.
But on the other hand, it’s actually not. Remember the old saying – A jack of all trades is master of none.
Flywheel Hosting – The Ultimate Review
When WordPress Managed hosting is mentioned there are a few popular companies that come into the minds of many such as Bluehost, Site Ground, Wp Engine, Hostinger, and a few others.
Inevitably, Flywheel, although a new brand, is among these series of popular brands.
With all the tons of features it has in store for users, this is no further from the truth.
Unlike other mere hosting providers which only provide users with a few basic features, Flywheel hosting provides the basic features, gets everything done for you, buttered with additional perks to enhance user satisfaction.
Convesio, like other managed WordPress hosting providers, provides consumers with an easy-to-use, hassle-free server-side.
As a result, using their service relieves you of the technical aspects of WordPress management. In other words, you don’t need a server administrator to manage and maintain the performance of your website.
So now, let’s take a closer look at these features.
Flywheel Hosting Reviews – Features
As said earlier, Flywheel hosting comes with a lot of great and intriguing features.
Precisely, Flywheel has in combo all the features you’d expect from a conventional Managed WordPress hosting provider.
However, it adds up to their package by adding additional features which makes it eminent.
Without much chatter, let’s get this started.
1. Security Features
Personally, I’d like to take security as my first watch-out feature when involving myself on anything that could possibly place risk on my site – Well, I think that should be a proposed guide for everyone.
Flywheel, on the other hand, does not relent on this aspect. The company has everything in place to provide users a seamless experience void of hackers or security breaches.
One thing that makes Flywheel services stand out is that they’re mostly automated – So you don’t have to get your hands dirty, trying to watch out for security threats.
The company engages in the use of several security applications/addons to further increase the security of websites hosted on the platform.
It employs the use of a Web application firewall (WAF) which is widely known for preventing, reducing, and curbing security threats and DDoS attacks.
Also For every service fully purchased, users are given a Free SSL certificate, powered by Let’s Encrypt.
To further advance their security levels, Flywheel employs the use of Free malware removal carried out by expert software engineers.
Native security measures such as the use of 2-factor authentication and “limited login attempt” are employed to stop the invasion of brute force attacks on websites
One other thing that places Flywheel hosting at its peak is the availability of its IP blocking feature, termed intelligent IP Blocking.
The Intelligent IP Blocking feature helps to automatically detect suspicious activity from intruders and also blocks them from accessing your site, entirely.
Flywheel hosting aims to provide a reliable and secured platform so users won’t have to rely on any external Plugins.
2. Blueprints Feature
Lots of people, especially newbies, usually get scared of having to build a WordPress site from scratch.
You can’t help but blame the fact that it’s somewhat stressful.
Well, this is not the case for Flywheel – you’re all covered. The company gets all the work of creating a site and designing all done for you, using the Blueprint services.
The Blueprints service allows users to easily access and automatically install a list of frequently used plugins and themes that are pre-configured.
3. Automated Nightly Backup
If you have ever experienced a security threat, data breach, or have mistakenly messed up with your site’s configurations previously then you would most likely never joke with site Backup.
It’s the prayer of every web developer to avoid the catastrophic scene of losing their site’s data – Yeah, this is true, But what if you just want to roll back to your previous back. How do you get there?
Well, this is where Flywheel comes in.
The web hosting claims to provide users with seamless Automatic Backups taken up every single night that passes out. The interesting part is that their backups are stored for a period of 30day.
So, you don’t need to be worried about manually creating backups for your site monthly, weekly, or even daily – you’re all covered.
4. Blazing Speed
Speed!
This is the part that most people, especially newbies, tend to ignore.
Website Speed optimization is one thing that can ruin your efforts in so many aspects (including SEO, sales conversion, user experience, and so many others).
Research has it that;
- There is a 103% increase in bounce rate for every 2 seconds delay experienced by users – Akamai.
- A 0.1s increase in load time would result in a corresponding 8% increase in conversion rate – Deloitte.
- 25% of users would leave a site if it takes longer than 4 seconds to load properly.
- You have barely 5 seconds to impress and engage your users before they leave your website – Loadstorm.
If you would like to do things correctly, in terms of Page Speed optimization, then you’ll need to focus on the basis of speed optimization (Your web hosting provider).
According to my personal research on the few sites, I have worked with, the web host of a site takes about 60% accountability of its speed rate.
That being said, if you care much about your site’s speed then you should try considering Flywheel.
Flywheel hosting provides all the needfuls to get your site load as fast as possible. It employs the use of various inductions, technologies, and applications to further fast forward your site’s speed.
So how do they actually do this?
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- Flycache – Flywheel, via its products Flycache, performs a free server-side caching solution tailored only to WordPress sites.
- MaxCDN – On Flywheel’s journey to providing a blazing, nimble speed performance for sites, they employ the use of a free Content delivery network (CDN) powered by MaxCDN
- Google Cloud platform – They didn’t just end only on providing a cache system backed up with a CDN solution, rather they went further to partnering with the Google cloud platform.
- Multiple Servers – Unlike many other hosting providers would do, Flywheel provides a list of multiple servers centered worldwide. A few of this list includes 4 servers in the United States and singles in Singapore, Japan, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
- Nginx server – Flywheel also partners with one of the web servers software, NGINX, to enhance the stability and performance of sites hosted on the platform. NGINX services include reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, web serving, and many others.
To further comment on Flywheel, we took an overview of Flywheel hosting speed performance reports directed by Hosting Uptime. This is what we found;
Flywheel Hosting in comp[arism to other hosting providers;
5. Convenience and User Friendliness
If you’re like me or like most non-techy users, then you would most likely take this section seriously.
Well, if you fall under this category of people; Good news! You’re in safer hands.
Instead of the buggy, clunky Cpanel which most hosting providers make use of, Flywheel provides a customized sleek easy to use hosting dashboard for users.
With Flywheel, you don’t need the use a third-party service at any point in time.
In addition, Flywheel makes it just easy to take a ride through their basic features. You can easily create an account and run a test site in seconds without the need to add your credit card or make payments.
By accessing their dashboard, you would get a list of buttons and options to easily execute distinct functions.
One of these functions is the settings that would allow users to manage multiple users on the platform. With this, you can add multiple users to your account without having them being able to access certain features.
This might not be useful if you singly run your website. But what if you’re an organization, then Flywheel is the solution.
Also, by merely accessing Flywheel’s dashboard you can easily get access to upload files, navigate to the WordPress dashboard and make other little changes.
6. Support And Contact Service
Alongside all other features aforementioned, Flywheel doesn’t feel relent on their support service.
Flywheel has a fully-fledged team of WordPress experts, so-called “Happiness engineers”.
These engineers are available 24/7/365 to meet up all queries provided via several communication channels such as live chat, Social media, Email tickets, and even Phone calls.
Also, the company has in provision, over three hundred documentation articles all prepared, ready to answer any questions probably popping into your mind.
7. Flywheel WordPress Local Development
If you want to get things done on your site locally, then this feature might just appeal to your needs.
Instead of spending time debugging and setting up a local wordless environment manually, Flywheel makes setting a local WordPress environment sound simple.
With a few clicks, you can easily create a WordPress local website that would be able to manage offline at your own pace. After which, you can download the file to your device and handle them offline.
Also, if you wish to, you can easily share the files with anyone via a custom link. By accessing the data, they can customize, edit and update your site’s data. But remember; this is locally done.
Additionally, If you would like to make your local update visible to your real site, Flywheels allows you to do this effortlessly.
You don’t need to go over the stress of uploading your local WordPress site again, as you can access the data via flywheel’s dashboard.
However, the Flywheel Local development site feature comes with a downside. And that’s the fact that the software download size is relatively much; roughly 500MB or more.
8. Staging-Site Feature
We’re humans and we’re prone to make mistakes from one time to another; this applies to everything as well as WordPress.
The question here is, are there any prevention, precautions, or even solutions to these never-ending mistakes?
Likewise, Flywheel has a way to solve this.
Flywheel employs the use of Staging-site feature – A trending feature in the world of web development used by many users to indirectly test newly added features added to a WordPress website without making them live.
The staging site feature works the same as Flywheel’s Local development site feature but in a more advanced way.
With this feature, you can simply head over to the staging site tab, make your preferred changes, see how it appears on your site, and then publish them if you wish to.
To make things more secure and safe, Flywheel integrates security measures (password-protected software) to help prevent unauthorized people from breaching your data.
Preferably, if you are working on a site that is built and updated with the help of teamwork, then the Staging site feature would work better than the Local development site feature.
9. Flywheel Account Collaboration Function
So, you work with a team of developers, you don’t want them to access your WordPress dashboard, you only want to give them temporary access to the hosting dashboard, then I’m sure you would love Flywheel Account Collaboration feature.
Instead of going through all the stress and hassles of having to create logins and IDs for multiple accounts, Flywheel makes it way more easier than the norm.
You can get this done by simply adding the email address of the user of your choice. Flywheel would then automatically send an invitation link, via the used email address, to the person.
The persons added can then access your site, handle tasks and operations a normal user would.
After work done by these users, you also have the ability to easily remove them and revoke their access to your dashboard.
To further enhance team work, Flywheel has another intriguing feature for teamwork – The organization option. With this, you can create a single dashboard that will be able to handle multiple sites with just a few clicks.
Pros and Cons Of Flywheel Hosting
Before we wrap up this review, let’s take out some comparisons to the advantages and disadvantages of Flywheel Hosting.
Pros
- Flywheel hosting employs the use of a list of security software to increase the security level of sites hosted on the platform.
- Flywheel deals with the entire process involved in the migration of your site.
- Flywheel accords unique IP addresses dedicated to each site registered under their platform.
- Flywheel, using the organization feature, allows users to handle multiple sites with a single dashboard.
- Defying the odds, Flywheel offers an email hosting service even though it’s focused mainly on managed WordPress hosting. Note– this feature is an addon
- It comes with an easy-to-use staging site feature.
- Flywheel Blueprints feature is impeccable.
- It comes with a nightly auto-backing feature which is done offsite. So you don’t need to do that manually.
- Flywheel guarantees stable, light-speed performance.
Cons
- It is relatively pricey on their plans, especially if you’re into handling multiple sites.
Final Thoughts
Flywheel Hosting is a good hosting provider – you can tell, if you’ve completely read this article.
They provide outstanding hosting options which you, probably, may not be able to find elsewhere.
Talk about their speed, stability, performance, security features? They’re all top notch!
If you’re really in to go for a managed WordPress hosting, then Flywheel might be a suitable option.
