In this video Shaun Whynacht, a web developer with over 15 years of experience, reviews Flywheel’s managed WordPress hosting. He begins by emphasizing that when choosing a host, reliability and support matter more than price, warning against ultra‑cheap options. He explains that Flywheel’s service is built on Google infrastructure and is fine‑tuned specifically for WordPress, making it unsuitable for non‑WordPress sites. Shaun describes Flywheel’s migration process, highlighting a proprietary plugin that moves a site in minutes, and shares a case study of moving a high‑traffic WooCommerce store from SiteGround to Flywheel, noting improved speed and stability. He outlines Flywheel’s core features – staging environments, SSL certificates, plugin‑management service, detailed reporting, and add‑ons for e‑commerce sites – and discusses pricing tiers (Tiny, Small, etc.), the importance of matching storage, bandwidth, and monthly visits to the appropriate plan, and the ability to upgrade as traffic grows. He compares Flywheel to SiteGround (which he also recommends for non‑WordPress or multi‑platform hosting) and cautions against GoDaddy for high‑traffic sites. Throughout, he discloses his referral partnership and encourages viewers to use his link, while inviting questions in the comments. The video concludes with a friendly sign‑off encouraging “happy hosting.”
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Hey everyone, I know when it comes to web hosting, there's a lot of options out there. Now, I've been building websites for about 15 years, probably even more than that for my clients, let alone I've also had many different web hosts for my own business and own personal brands. And over the years, they come and they go. And one of the key things that you need to look at when choosing a web host for your business is not price. Now, keeping in mind that prices will vary and there will be dirt cheap, you know, web hosting out there, but there's a reason why those ones are extremely cheap. And then you could spend a whole lot on a web host. Um, but the reason that those are extremely expensive is because of the reliability and the support that you have. So you got to look for a middle road in there. And some of the key things that I think are extremely important, and this has been important for me and for my clients is support. Does the web hosting company that you choose have great support? Now I have recommended SiteGround before, and SiteGround is an amazing company. I absolutely love them. I use them for a lot of my sites. Um, but the second one that I've started to use, and I'm actually blown away by how the company, uh, culture is and how responsive they are is called Flywheel. You may have seen their ads around, and they mostly feature, or their main hook that they go after is managed WordPress hosting. So what is managed WordPress hosting? This means that their servers, they're running off the Google infrastructure, is fine-tuned for WordPress websites. So if you don't have a WordPress website, then don't even look at Flywheel, in my opinion. Look at something else. Go to SiteGround because you can host multiple different ones on there too. But WordPress is the biggest, you know, most common content management system out there, and you know, it's widely used, and most sites that you come across will be built in WordPress, and probably yours is as well. So their website, you can visit the link in the video below. I do use them for my clients. I am a referral partner of them, so the link below— I'm just going to be transparent to you— is my referral link. So show me some love and click on that when you check it out. Just going and looking at what they have here, they have a bunch of different tools. They manage WordPress hosting, WooCommerce sites, and this was something that we moved over an existing client from SiteGround to Flywheel. They were building, or they had built, and we'd built actually an e-commerce store for them, and it was doing quite well on SiteGround, no problem. But there were times where there would be some speed issues, it would slow down and stuff like that. So we were looking for hosting that would be optimized for that type of experience, and that's where Flywheel came into play. What they did was they took a look at the existing site, they looked at the site traffic, they looked at all the plugins that were in there, and they architected an exact hosting package that would really make that fly. And it did. I mean, we moved it over to the system. They have a proprietary plugin that you install. It will migrate the site automatically for you within minutes, just a couple clicks, and we're up and running, you know, within probably less than an hour when once we had the account set up, which was extremely awesome to do that. So WooCommerce sites, high-traffic sites, and there's a lot of add-ons in there. They have a great suite of reports. They have plugin management service for a couple extra dollars a month where they will update all the plugins on your site. So really, you know, if you want a kind of a system that you don't have to worry about, you know, is your site going to go down? Is it going to be fast enough for your visitors? Then Flywheel is something that you should consider. Now I'm not going to sit here and say this is the be-all end-all, you have to go with these guys. I do these videos because I just want to bring them to you as what I like about them. Now when we go and we look at the pricing here, this is what, what we've got, you know, with any type of SaaS, you know, software as a service business, um, or hosting or anything like this, they're always the option for annually versus monthly. And you know, the price is a little less if you go and pay the full year. So Let's look at monthly because most people can judge on that. So Tiny here, pretty, pretty comparable to other, you know, hosting sites like, you know, SiteGround. SiteGround, you can get it at, you know, probably 50% off that for that first year, but you don't have all that reliability and the function that's in there. So the biggest thing you need to really know is what is your current monthly visits to your site? And you can get that if you go look at your Google Analytics that's on your site. And then your storage. Now if you are uploading a lot of images to it and you have, you know, big galleries, you're gonna want to go with more storage. But this is what the storage is, how many files are being stored on there. And then what's the monthly bandwidth? So the bandwidth is how much data is being viewed on that website. So if you have, let's say, a membership site, or even, you know, you have an e-commerce store where you're selling digital products and they're downloading the file after they purchase, and those files actually hosted on your website, site, you're going to use up bandwidth for them to download. Now, if you're doing that, you could host those on like an AWS server outside of that, but that's what you're going to take into consideration here. They do have this great compare features option where you can see in a nice table how all the packages stack up that's in here. And one of the great things is you can start with the tiny package and you can start to watch it. And, you know, if you're approaching these, you can easily upgrade to the next one. So you don't have to kind of, you know, the worst thing that a lot of people might do is they go, okay, well, I think I'm here. I'm going to go with this one. And then they don't even use all these specs, right? And they could have gotten away with this one. So start with, you know, the base model unless you know for sure you're 100% over that, and then you can upgrade as you go through the system. So that is all the features. I'm not going to go through each and every one of them. You can go to the website and you can check that out. But what I absolutely loved about it is anytime you did a support ticket or a chat or even called them because they have a support phone number, you got prompt personable responses back from them. And they were fantastic in helping us in any of the questions that we had when we were moving over that client to the system. They have, you know, obviously staging options, so you can take a staging version of your site with a couple clicks, you know, make some adjustments to that, and then push that live over top of your site and then do that as opposed to editing your real site. So SSL security certificates so that all your sites have that little lock at the top. Is included with your hosting packages. It's extremely easy. So I'm gonna stop rambling on in this video, but I just wanted to tell you guys, you know, I wanted to expand your, your hosting horizons, right? I mean, as a marketing company ourselves, we get asked all the time, hey, you know what, my hosting is not that great, who do you recommend? Or if we're doing a new site, you know, they'll say, hey, you know, I'll go to GoDaddy, right? And you know, I'm gonna be one of many that probably will openly say try to avoid GoDaddy. Um, you know, just an opinion. I mean, they work for a lot of great sites, but if you're in a high-traffic site and you want, um, you know, consistency, I've just found the fall-off of that, um, has been, you know, not as ideal, uh, of, of a situation. That's where, you know, sites like Flywheel and SiteGround have really come aboard on kind of taking over that experience and providing a great user experience. So again, the link is in the comments to this video, and be sure to check it out. If you have any questions about it, by all means make a comment on this video. I will respond to it. It may take me a little bit to get to it if I don't see it right away, but I will respond to your video. And happy hosting, I guess, is how I'm going to sign this video off. Thanks.
