Yes. You can try Flywheel for free for 14 days. The benefit of this trial period is that you can start building your site with WordPress (they exclusively host WordPress sites) and see for yourself how well it runs with Flywheel. You’ll only pay for your plan once your site goes live. This demo site is also an opportunity to show clients a website in progress. Just transfer the billing and site ownership to your client once it’s live!
Flywheel accepts all major credit cards, including VISA, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express. You can also pay for annual subscriptions with a personal check or money order. If there are any issues with processing your card, there is also an option to pay via PayPal.
By choosing to focus solely on premium managed WordPress hosting, Flywheel chose to concentrate on doing one thing extraordinarily well — instead of generalizing its product portfolio and perhaps letting quality slip.
As such, your options may appear somewhat limited with Flywheel when comparing the company to other mass-market hosts. Managed VPS hosting is the only infrastructure option available, and there are two basic configurations of plans: one for individuals and businesses with single websites, as well as freelancers and agencies that need to accommodate sites in bulk. The plans are largely based on expected site visits per month but also on added features such as a content delivery network, SSL certificate, and disk space. All of them come with Local, a quick and easy tool for installing WordPress locally.
For a one-person operation or small business, Flywheel offers basic plans to get started with building a website requiring only one WordPress installation. These come with plenty of space for setting up shop online and providing information about your business. Better suited to meeting the needs of larger websites is the Professional plan, which comes with free staging to preview the site and its performance before publishing, as well as free CDN, the ability to run WordPress Multisite, and 1TB of bandwidth.
If you require multiple instances of WordPress, Flywheel has a plan for that (two of them, to be exact). Whether you’re a freelance web developer with a growing client list or an agency that aims to be a powerhouse, you’ll be set with all the bandwidth, disk space, and WordPress installs you need to meet your goals. Have some specific needs that none of the plans accommodate? Ask Flywheel to put together a custom plan. Add on their white-label billing platform to simplify client management and scale your business.
You can choose from either yearly or monthly cycles for all Flywheel plans. Signing up for a yearly hosting package nets customers a free month of service and only one billing date, but monthly offers a bit more flexibility for short, deadline-oriented projects.
Flywheel does not offer domain name registrations or email accounts. Instead, Flywheel provides a list of suggested companies for either service, along with instructions on how to link those other vendors’ products to your relevant Flywheel services.
Uptime is a measure of how reliable a host’s servers are. It’s a percentage based on how often in a given month the servers are up and running at their best performance versus being unavailable because of problems (during which time your website or application would be unavailable). This measurement doesn’t include scheduled downtime for maintenance and upgrades or downtime due to customer error, but rather unexpected hardware failures and errors.
With a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%, Flywheel has one of the most reliable networks and infrastructure, and some of the tightest security in the hosting industry. No matter how many visitors come to your site, Flywheel is dedicated to making sure your website is accessible to anyone interested in viewing it.
All of Flywheel’s hosting plans are managed WordPress hosting, so there is no need to pay for an upgrade. The perks of managed hosting are baked in!
Customers on both monthly and annual plans can cancel their subscriptions at any time. Upon a cancellation request, subscriptions will be active until the next billing cycle and then will be shut down. For this reason, Flywheel has a limited refund policy. Monthly subscribers have 72 hours after purchase or renewal to request a refund, while annual subscribers can request one within 30 days.
Because Flywheel is especially designed to host agencies and creatives, and is managed and runs on a VPS, their pricing is relatively higher than many other hosts. This difference is a reflection of the high-touch customer service their clients receive, the high speed of their servers compared to shared hosting, and plans that are made to accommodate sites with high traffic and large media files. That said, it is still a very affordable option and well-priced considering its prime features.
