Flywheel Review Visit Flywheel »

Laura Bernheim (HostingAdvice.com):

“Flywheel takes an interesting approach to web hosting by giving each customer a virtual private server, or VPS. The company doesn't offer shared or dedicated plans, instead focusing on doing one thing exceptionally well.

The company offers single-site or bulk hosting plans, referring to the number of WordPress installations allowed. The $14-per-month price tag for the most affordable single-site plan will seem a little steep for novice customers who are used to seeing shared hosting, unlimited websites, and costs less than $5 per month. The added infrastructure, resources, and managed support, however, make Flywheel an excellent deal for developers and designers with more discerning tastes.

Flywheel starts single-site hosting plans with 5GB of storage and 250GB of bandwidth, along with a free site migration and SSL certificate. Traffic is limited to 5,000 monthly visits with the most basic plan, but Flywheel won't shut off your site if you go over. Single-site plans scale to 100,000 monthly visits, 20GB of storage, and 1TB of bandwidth.

Flywheel doesn't share as much information about the company's infrastructure as we'd like, but we like what we can find: server-side Varnish caching, NGINX web servers, chrooted PHP-FPM, and, naturally, MySQL databases. All features allude to Flywheel's technical prowess and WordPress expertise.

With the infrastructure optimized for speed, Flywheel engineers devote ample time to security. In fact, Flywheel is so confident in its protections that customers aren't allowed to install additional security plugins for fear of interference and slowing down performance. Servers are configured with WordPress security best practices, and server-level blocking and scanning services prevent brute force attacks and protect core files.

If a site does become infected, Flywheel will remove the malware for free. Flywheel's partnership with Sucuri means customers get world-class malware scanning, and the company's intelligent IP blocking detects attackers within seconds and prevents them from attacking the network.”

Laura Bernheim (HostingAdvice.com):

“It seems rather obvious (and repetitive) to say that a web host that solely hosts WordPress sites excels at hosting WordPress — but it's true. In addition to infrastructure optimized for the world-famous content management system, Flywheel offers several proprietary, one-of-a-kind services that extend WordPress hosting beyond traditional norms.

We're suckers for hosts that provide WordPress staging environments, and Flywheel has one of the best — no need for an additional server or plugins. Users can push and pull changes between production and staging environments with just one click of the mouse, in addition to selectively merging the database or just themes and plugins. Staging environments are the perfect way to test how new plugins or updated versions of WordPress will affect your website.

Flywheel further streamlined the design and development process when it acquired popular local WordPress development platform Pressmatic, eventually relaunching it as Local by Flywheel. Local™ removes the technical headaches of configuration and debugging local environments and allows for one-click WordPress installations, flexible infrastructure, simple root access, and shareable URLs.

We also appreciate that Flywheel enables designers, developers, and agencies to package together commonly used themes and plugins for rapid, automated configuration of new sites and projects. Blueprints can be saved and deployed with speed and simplicity, empowering you to focus on a client's specific needs and customizations.

In addition to free site migrations and all-VPS architecture, Flywheel further expands WordPress hosting with performant server-side Varnish caching and full-featured, free demo sites.

Everything is controlled from a gorgeous, easy-to-use interface. All your sites are hosted and accessible through the admin portal, meaning you don't have to remember all the different logins for sites you manage. Traditional hosting customers might miss the standard cPanel installation, but Flywheel's platform was clearly designed for people passionate about well-crafted user experiences.”