Do you want reliable, fast and ultra secure WordPress web hosting for your clients or yourself? There are many great options out there, but today I want to point out our personal favorite based on now five years of working with them.
There are 6 primary reasons we recommend Flywheel, although the list could get nuanced and go on to dozens of reasons easily.
#1 – Hosting Made for WordPress
Flywheel only supports WordPress websites. They don’t mess around with any other CMS platforms or any other hosting offers. All their cloud servers are built, configured and maintained to optimize performance around WordPress. As of 2019, they moved onto the Google Cloud Platform so they can even “burst” with huge spikes in traffic. They call this “Instant scaling technology”
#2 – 24×7 Customer Service
Customer service is a dream with Flywheel. Exactly what you would hope. When you log into your Flywheel Dashboard, you can open a chat to cover a great deal of support issues (you may have to wait a few minutes for a live operator, but it’s worth it).
These guys know WordPress. I can personally testify to several dozen support chats where they solved my problem, made really great suggestions and offered guidance that went so far outside. Take that GoDaddy and your boxed support.
If for some reason a chat support team member can’t help you, they will escalate it to the next level support team that will support you through their awesome ticketing system. You can manage the support requests in the dashboard or through email…. or both.
*We are going to put one item in the suggestion box for Flywheel as of March 2019. They should absolutely have uptime monitoring and notices (or even an app).
#3 – Security
Shhhhh… one of the dirty little secrets of WordPress is that it’s a highly targeted platform for hackers and bots. Flywheel knows this and they have a full army of people that use the most sophisticated hardware, software, configuration and monitoring to prevent intrusion.
Keep in mind, that updating plugins, themes and WordPress core is essential for security. The number one way that hackers get into websites is outdated plugins. Right Here Interactive offers Managed Services programs to help keep you up to date on everything WordPress.
If for some reason your website is compromised, Flywheel has great tools and will scan/remove whatever malicious code may have been injected into your WordPress site. Did I mention they do that gratis!
*Free SSL
SSL security is critical in this day and age. Google rewards SSL and penalizes non SSL. With Flywheel, they offer a free SSL certificate for a single domain. Now your website can have the https in the browser and leave behind the antiquated and passe http of yesteryear.
#4 – Easy Backups (and restoring)
Every once in a while, you’ll probably want to make big changes or even simple upgrades to your WordPress website and then kabloom… it blows up on you. Not to fear, you have Flywheel backups.
In your dashboard, you’ll see the backups. You’ll see the daily backups that Flywheel runs, you can create an instant backup with a single click and you can restore to any point in your retention history (currently up to 30 days) with another set of clicks and confirmations. It’s so easy, you’ll be wondering how you lived without it before.
#5 – Staging
When you have some changes you want to make to your website that go beyond simple content changes to your pages and posts, you can use your staging copy at any time. The staging is a duplicate of your website outside of the public’s view where you can make all those changes and when you complete them, you push your changes on staging to the live site with a single click in the dashboard.
There are some nuances as to when and the best practices for using staging sites that we’ll cover in a separate blog article later one.
#6 – Flywheel Local
Very much like the staging, Flywheel introduced Local, a desktop software app for Mac and PC that you download for free and can create a copy of your website to your local machine, work on it and then sync it back to the live site when you are ready. This is great for a lot of reasons, particularly how fast you can make edits and changes without waiting on a server, which has lag time. It can also help when you’re connection to the Internet itself might be spotty (read: you work-a-holics who still try to get things done while on the sunny beaches of Canada).
Bonus – Blueprints (for advertising agencies and freelancers)
If you and your advertising agency develop several websites, then you might love the blueprints feature as much as we do. Flywheel has one click installation of WordPress, but that just gives you a shell. If you’re like us, we have some standard plugins, themes and settings we like all of our websites to have. So, we set up a website and add all those elements and configurations and then create a blueprint of it. The next time we set out to turn on another client’s new website… we use the blueprint as the starting points. Blueprints can save hours of installation and configuration time on every project.
By the way… we were not, nor will we be paid or comped by flywheel to write this post. We just dig them.