Flywheel was founded by Dusty Davidson, Tony Noecker, and Rick Knudtson, all of whom have a web development background. They built the company to mirror their idea of the perfect WordPress host:
Flywheel is the company we wish existed when we were in your shoes.
This was 2012. By 2017 their company grew to be 100 person strong, won a number of awards and 5 customers proposed to them. Flywheel have offices in the US, UK, Germany and Australia.
Culture is very important to Flywheel and it’s reflected across everything they do: products, support, operations and marketing. Their core values are:
- We are excellent to each other
- We are data-driven, not data-informed
- We embrace weirdness
- We are productive community members
This is very much reflected in how they engage with their customers and the broader WordPress community, and in particular with developers.
Please note: FlyWheel has been purchased by WP Engine. Read the Press Release.
Flywheel’s WordPress Hosting
Flywheel are transitioning to Google Cloud to “a new powerhouse platform that is more scalable, more resilient, and faster than ever.” Google’s infrastructure allows Flywheel’s new plans to feature:
- Auto-healing technology
- Instant-scaling technology
- A new caching product – FlyCache
- Staging on all plans
- Options for high-availability
- Free CDN (coming soon)
Flywheel Cloud is being rolled out over the next months and existing customers will be upgraded for free.
Hosting Plans
Flywheel offers six hosting plans as well as bespoke solutions for enterprise. The hosting plans fall into two buckets with three options each — single sites and many sites.
Single sites:
- Tiny – from USD $14 month
- Personal – from USD $28 month
- Professional – from USD $69 month
For many sites:
- Freelance – from USD $92 month
- Agency – from USD $229 month
- Custom – Contact Flywheel for a made-to-order solutions
Enterprise – get in touch to discuss a customer solution
Local by Flywheel
Local is a free tool that allows developers to build their WordPress website on their computer and deploy to a production environment (which doesn’t necessarily have to be a Flywheel plan).
There are paid options for agencies and larger development teams:
- Team – USD $50 month
- Enterprise – Call for pricing
Flywheel’s WordPress Support & Management
Flywheel have developed their own administration function to manage WordPress instances and workflow too, as an alternative to cPanel:
Say goodbye to cPanel! Our dashboard was designed to perfectly blend form and function, whether you have one site or 100.
Many of the functions have been developed for freelance developers and agencies, to facility and streamline the design and build process, including collaboration with clients.
- Free migration on a demo server (and start paying when you push the website live)
- Template WordPress instances to quickly spin up a new website
- Collaborator access
- Option to transfer billing to clients
- Staging environments
Support
Flywheel customers are able to reach support 24 hours a day via chat, in-app tickets and phone. The latter is available to those paying USD $250 a month or more.
Support staff – known as Happiness Engineers – are distributed globally and are WordPress experts.
