Flywheel Reviews

hacking and excuses
it’s was great for many years but now it’s absolutely useless
I’m switching

Date of experience: April 01, 2024

Using "Get Help" window: Invalid answer from an agent and somehow the system is writing messages by itself as if I was the one writing it. For example "Thank you very much sir" and "Have a nice day", etc. Those messages is something that the system somehow writes by itself without my consent. As if I were the one who wrote that. Check this image as an example: ibb[dot]co/n1pWMjG (Replace the [dot] by a real dot symbol) (The image from this URL will be automatically removed after 1 month)

Date of experience: August 29, 2023

Ever since the switch last June 2023, the website went downhill. Errors never stopped. I cannot provide the receipt as proof because I am not the owner, but I am the SEO specialist of that site and I can share the URL in private. Before Flywheel the SEO performance was great. After the switch to Flywheel, errors never stopped that I had to audit every week!

Date of experience: November 01, 2023

DO NOT WASTE YOUR $$$
Regular crashes. Almost predictable downtime. 80% uptime AT BEST. Absolutely horrible, detestable enterprise. Hosting companies that charge $5 a month are more reliable than this monstrosity of a company. I cannot stress how terrible of a solution they are. If you care about your website do not host it here.

Date of experience: October 14, 2019

Be advised that Flywheel, per WP Engine's Terms of Service (WP Engine acquired Flywheel within the past few years), requires 30-days notice to cancel a monthly subscription. I've canceled many monthly subscriptions in my life. My consistent experience has been that you can cancel at any point in the billing cycle. No prorated refund, but no charges beyond what you've already paid either. That's a fair and reasonable way to operate. There are solid managed WordPress providers out there that do not require a 30-day notice should you decide to cancel. I never intend to do business with Flywheel again.

Date of experience: May 28, 2022

Very disappointed.
Been with Flywheel for more than 5 years. Technical support has been good until recently, after WP Engine bought over this company. My site had an error and for many crucial days their ‘happiness engineers’ either send me technical documents to figure my way out or merely ask me to find my own developer to troubleshoot the issue. This is despite me telling them I do not know any coding and similar issues had happened before and they must have known the resolution. The engineers just refused to help. Only after opening a few more tickets did someone new stepped up and assisted. Getting technical support is based on luck now.

Date of experience: May 19, 2023

My experience with getflywheel.com has been nothing short of frustrating. The site itself is a glaring example of inefficiency, taking an exasperating 8 seconds to load. What's more disheartening is the dismissive response from the support team, who nonchalantly claim that the issues are beyond the scope of their service.

It's particularly aggravating when you consider the fact that Flywheel markets itself as the fastest hosting provider. The irony is hard to ignore, and I can't help but dub them "slowwheel" with their accompanying lackluster support. It's disappointing to see a company fail to live up to the very promises they boldly advertise.

Date of experience: December 07, 2023

Terrible customer support. Their payment gateway was not able to charge my card?paypal even though funds were available and cards were working with other website. I've been a customer for around 3 years and their customer support has declined significantly in that time. I will be moving my sites to another hosting provider ASAP....

Date of experience: January 22, 2022

Terrible customer support. Their payment gateway was not able to charge my card even though funds were available and when I reached out to customer support they "raised a ticket" but they did not bring my client's site back online. I've been a customer for around 18 months and their customer support has declined significantly in that time. I will be moving my sites to another hosting provider ASAP.... as soon as they action the ticket.

Date of experience: June 02, 2021

Being with flywheel for a number of years it was good and the support was amazing, helpful and they went the extra mile. Since WP Engine bought the company the support has become no existent for a 'MANAGED' wordpress hosting company.

I am in the process of moving my sites away due to the poor support and the fact that the websites I host have now slowed down to a crawl. If you ask for more resources they want to charge you more.

2 years ago I would of sang Flywheels praises but now I'd recommend you avoid. There are a ton of better companies out there.

Date of experience: February 12, 2022

I took over my companies website and last person used Flywheel. They have no c-panel, the speed is slower then other hosting options, and to top it all off you get less for your money. Even trying to get refunded my money and cancel services was a hassle. You have to give a 30 day notice that you want a refund even though you cancel your services. I'm also having issues getting that refund, every time I write a ticket stating they aren't doing what I requested they just close the ticket and don't respond. They act like they are a recommended hosting for Wordpress.org but they aren't! Only Bluehost, Dreamhost & Siteground are and for good reason, flywheel sucks!

Date of experience: October 04, 2022

We move over in January 2023. The website has the poorest performance and tragic traffic conditions, with 50% rating from a 99% rating on Lighthouse and most pages not indexed. They brought on an enormous workload. I hate them!

Date of experience: May 03, 2023

I don't normally do the review thing but with Flywheel I'll make an exception.

Their customer service is second to none. In the few occasions I've needed to contact them (which means malware infections or my site not working for some reason), their response time, speedy resolution and cheery disposition have been exemplary.

And that's when you want support. You don't really think about hosting until something goes wrong.

Clearly a few folk appear to think the opposite but my own experience has been nothing but first class.

Kudos.

Date of experience: February 09, 2023

I used to love Flywheel - despite the slightly higher price point they have always had awesome support and excellent uptime...

But since WP Engine took over, that's gone downhill.
- More downtime
- Slower support
- More salesy... I seem to have a new 'account manager' every month trying to push some upsell or add-on.

It still has a great dashboard and SendGrid email deliverability which is handy, but not enough to keep me as a customer.

I'll be moving all of my websites to a new host that has better performance and costs less.

Date of experience: March 23, 2023

I have a very bad impression about a Flywheeltaxi ride today. I got in the taxi with my grandmother who just done surgery at 900 Hyde st Hospital. She was very weak and needed a smooth ride, but the driver is kind of mean. He drove very fast and unevenly, which I can bear. But what irritated me most was that he deliberately pretended not to hear when I repeated a few times of "Please, stop at Ortega 19th".

Before reaching the destination, he suddenly yelled, "Here's Ortega st!" My grandma was terrified by the roar, and I felt very angry.
My grandma is over 90 years old and has just finished treatment, and she is very fragile. How can that driver treat me and my grandma like this?
The driver's car number is K1113
A license plate 33573U1,red Toyota Camry hybrid

Date of experience: April 06, 2021

This hosting company was great to start with and then as we used them as an agency, we quickly found that the servers are not fit for purpose.

The servers don't have enough power to update plugins without crashing the entire website.

The absolute reason for this poor review, however, is that they lock down a lot of the core WP files so when you want to leave, it's incredibly difficult. Our new hosting company tried for a week to get sites away and couldn't without using migration plugins.

This resulted in having to use their services for more time while we got all 50 of our websites off. Their tactic seems to be to make it incredibly hard to leave so you have to pay for more time with them.

This was all relayed to our client handler who didn't seem to care at all.

I would say ok for hosting one small site. Agencies should avoid at all costs.

Date of experience: March 31, 2021

I run 4 medium to large websites with Flywheel. It has never gone down in 4 years to my experience. They keep daily backups, have phpmyadmin, give me useful security alerts and have support staff who actually know something about Wordpress. They are by far the best hosting company I know of.

Date of experience: April 19, 2022

Do not use this hosting company. Its total scam

1- They do not provide you cPanel
2- They will not show you the wp-content folder if you try to access files via the file manager plugin
3- Only way to upload or download files or plugins is FTP
4- ftp is very slow to upload 1 plugin it will take 6 hours.

Pure scam

Date of experience: September 09, 2020

I got hacked multiple times which led to terrible SEO implications. Each time, I would update all the plugins and themes, their teams would run an automated and manual scan, and I was assured that my site was "clean." The hack just came back each and every time over the course of 6 months. I've just canceled and have moved over to Webflow.

The customer service agents were kind and helpful, but their malware scan processes are not thorough at all. I was very clear that I needed a deep review and I had to insist on multiple scans when they "missed" many compromised files the first time. After the third hack, I had to go into FTP myself to try to clean up the site since they don't react quickly.

Not recommended at all if you want reliable "managed" hosting. Please save yourselves the trouble and go elsewhere.

Date of experience: November 29, 2020

I love my hosting provider, Flywheel. They always have fantastic support times, getting me answers in minutes. They help out with technical issues as well as dumb blonde moments with grace. The support staff is fantastic, and the hosting is excellent. I have never experienced downtime outside of those scheduled. Keep up the great work, Flywheel!

Date of experience: March 16, 2020