FlyWheel Review: Where you host your website matters

Your website is your most expensive marketing asset. Where you host it matters. Often times business owners will pick the cheapest hosting platform thinking it doesn’t affect SEO, performance or user experience but in fact, your host is the foundation of great SEO and user experience so you need to host your website in a safe stable environment for your business marketing to work.

Flywheel is a WordPress-only website hosting platform. It is designed to keep WordPress websites running fast and safe by managing updates and providing amazing customer service. It does cost a bit more than the really inexpensive platforms but the extra cost is worth it when your site is running fast and doesn’t go down. to we are doing a Flywheel review so you can understand why the platform is the best out there for WordPress websites.

Where you host your website matters. Today, Audrey is going to talk about your business’s biggest and most expensive asset: your website. No one likes a site that is down, slow or just straight-up broken. And just like you’d get frustrated and leave that site, your leads will too if they have that experience on your website. That is why Audrey recommends FlyWheel for hosting your WordPress site. Take a listen to this episode as Audrey provides a Flywheel review and talks about the benefits of having a great hosting platform with amazing customer service because, ultimately, you get what you pay for.

Links Mentioned In This Episode 

Products We Recommend:

Sign Up for FlyWheel – 2 months free

Links to Previous Episodes:

Episode 4- Hosting Options To Drive Business

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What we discussed:

• Why FlyWheel?
• Pricing
• Plug-ins
• Free migration

Where you host your website matters. Your website is your most
expensive and biggest marketing asset. If your site is down, running
slow or broken, users will have a bad experience, which can lead to lost
sales. Going for the cheapest option to host your most lucrative asset is
a big mistake. So who should you host with?
If you have a WordPress website, we recommend FlyWheel. It’s who we
use for hosting all of our clients. So today I’m going to talk to you about
my favorite things, my reasons for using FlyWheel as a hosting platform.
Okay. So just a bit of housekeeping before we get into the podcast,
wherever you’re listening to this, I’m going to be referencing a bunch of
different links.
Previous episodes go to the website and kamau.com go to the episode
and,definitely go check out the show notes. All of the links are going to
be in there. Chocked full of good stuff and a rough transcript of this
entire episode. So that way, if there’s something you just want to follow
up on real quickly, you can, and you can just go find it in the show notes.
And then, I wanted to let everyone know, that we have launched a new.
Educational only blog called marketing masterminds. So this is for all of
you out there that are still DIY buying all of your marketing. What we
want is for you to do it the right way. So marketing masterminds has
articles on how to do things, what tool sets to use and what’s going to be
coming is we’re going to be offering video training and all sorts of good
stuff.
So it’s all free. We’re not charging you for it. What we have there is,
we’re basically telling you the products that we like to use, that we have
tested, and we have affiliate links for those products there. So when you
click on it, we get a little something back for all that great content that
we’re creating for you.
Okay. So now let’s get in to, FlyWheel.
like I said, in the beginning where you host really matters, and here’s
why your website is a reflection of your brand. It’s probably the biggest
one, because any type of marketing you do, including handing someone
a business card, pushes them back to the website. If your website’s not
working, if it’s designed poorly, it doesn’t have all your services.

If it’s not correct, you could lose potential customers. They’re going to go
there and they’re going to go, wow, this is a horrible website. It must be
a horrible company. that reflection of their opinion of your website gets
directly assigned to your business. And so that’s why,Hosting matters,
right?
Because hosting is a huge part of how well your site runs. page loads,
I’m going to be talking about a bunch of different things. Making sure that
features are working actually has to do with the platform that everything
is on. So a good host will make a huge difference. So before I get into
features, let’s talk about why I’m recommending FlyWheel.
so we use FlyWheel exclusively as our hosting platform when we are
building and hosting sites for our client. And just so you know, when we
build a site, we require it to be hosted with us. Because again, there are
so many variables in a host that we knock all those variables out by
knowing the investment.
Inside and out, and that we’re managing it. so that we’re not having to
deal with, external factors. But the good thing is, is FlyWheel does let
anyone sign up for an account where they want to host just a single
website. You don’t have to be on their enterprise program and platform.
so their services different than what you’re seeing advertised out there
for other hosting sites.
And so the biggest difference with FlyWheel is that it’s a managed
platform. for WordPress sites only. There’s nothing else ,on their
servers. it’s just WordPress. So you’re not going to have any weird
interaction between different, underlying software stacks, which is one of
the reasons that.
We really like it. Other providers they’ll have a server out there and
they’ll maybe have a little bit of WordPress. They have a little maybe
HTML or,other types of, programs all on the same server. And then they
may be actually at different version levels. Because on an unmanaged
server, meaning they don’t make sure that everybody’s website.
software is the same level you could have in compatibility with versions.
So here’s what I mean is let’s say your website is on the latest version of
WordPress, but another website totally unrelated to you sitting on the
same server, there are two or three versions behind that can actually
cause problems with server.

And the host providers don’t do anything about this until the server
actually fails. They don’t care if it’s running slow, they don’t really care if
your site is going up and down and your performance is bad when the
server is done, that’s when they’re going to replace it out. Because
again, they’re all about volume.
They want to put as many people on a server, regardless of the software
stack or the versions that it’s on.
This is from experience. When we first started hosting, our first website
for a client, way, way back in the day we were using blue host. And
that’s what we were experiencing. The site would go up, the site would
go down, pages would load sometimes pages wouldn’t and then, we
contacted support and they were like, yeah, that server’s going to be
replaced, but we don’t know when which wasn’t good enough for us.
So then we moved everything to Amazon web services, and managed
our own servers there, but we needed a lot of technical expertise on staff
in order to do that. because everything had to be written and coded
directly and managed, and it worked beautifully. We loved AWS, but
again, over the years, then we found FlyWheel, which is really great
because a non-technical person can learn.
migrate and manage sites without knowing any code. And that’s where
the managed hosting comes in from FlyWheel. Meaning you put in those
requests through their online system, which is fabulous. And there are
people behind the scenes do all of the things and they’re the technical
ones. that’s why we like using it because it frees up our staff for other
things.
And we know that it’s being watched every day all of the time. So now
let’s get into some of my favorite features for a FlyWheel. The first always
got to talk about pricing, right? Cause that’s usually the number one
question. Well, it’s like, for all this, what’s it going to cost me? so a
single-site starter package is either 15 or $30 and that’s based off of the
volume of traffic that you’re getting.
And that’s with no other add on. So that’s the managed service fee. So if
you think about it, yeah. It’s not the cheapest out there, but it’s actually
not that expensive. And when you sign up for them at the time of this
recording, they usually keep, different specials going. You get two
months free with that.

And there’s a bunch of features that come with. 15 to $30 pricing. So
let’s talk about what some of those are so the first one is you get a free
SSL certificate just comes with it and you need one. Doesn’t matter if
you’re a service-based company, you have one page, you have five
pages, your e-commerce, everybody needs an SSL certificate today,
right?
It is a web best practice. Biggest reason is Chrome actually started this,
the Chrome browser. And now all of the browsers have followed suit. Is
that if you don’t have a valid SSL certificate associated to your site,
Chrome is going to warm people. They’re going to put up little red
and,yellow, exclamation sign saying that the site is not safe.
Safari is doing that now too. And I believe the Microsoft edge browser
does it too. And the average user isn’t going to understand, it’s a service
site. They don’t have an SSL certificate. Oh, they’re safe. No, they’re
going to say, what’s wrong with this site? Why is it not safe? So simply
by installing.
The SSL certificate, making sure your site is secure, takes care of that.
And it comes with your FlyWheel account and it’s really easy to set up, in
the dash. You click on the install, the SSL certificate, and it actually does
it all for you right onto the website. You don’t have to do anything else.
The next thing is a C D N cash.
So for all of you, people that want to know what CDN means, it’s called a
content delivery network and really what this is, it’s just. a group of
geographically distributed servers that speed up the delivery of your
website content for where your user is. So they’re all over the country, all
over the world, right?
these small little servers. And so let’s say I’m going to your site and I’m
in Ohio. The CDN is actually going to activate the version of your patient.
Closest to my location in Ohio and push it from there. Versus if I were in
California, it’s going to pull those up so that there’s like little mini copies
of your site all over these, servers so that , the site gets sent to you as
quickly as possible.
And the reason why this is so important is that. Part of your search
engine optimization ranking for any particular page with Google? Is the
performance of your site? Like how fast it loads, right? So the faster your
site loads, the better your rankings can be. And I think more importantly,

SEO is important, but user experience, when a user comes to your site
and your site loads quickly, They have a better experience, From the
beginning, you’re starting off great with them. And then they see the
content and they do the things. So does CDN matter. here’s the thing.
So we had a client where they use someone else to build their website
and launch it. And they were not happy. The site wasn’t finished the way
they wanted and what we noticed that they didn’t even realize that the
site was really slow when you loaded it. Like it took forever to load. And
so what we did as part of the agreement when we took over their site is
we moved it to our host. Now, when we moved it onto our FlyWheel
servers, we didn’t change anything.
We didn’t update plugins. we didn’t take any old plugins out cause extra
plugins can sometimes slow stuff down. All we did was. And we saw a
dramatic increase in website load speed just from the move. and then
we went through and we made sure that,the WordPress,software and
PHP and everything were all upstate, all the plugins were updated and
that helped a little bit as well, but the most significant increase was
changing, the host for the web.
So now let’s talk a little bit about plugins. So WordPress, if you want to
do anything in there, you need plugins for all of the good fun stuff. And
the more plugins you have, you might have a risk of,Speed issues, but
definitely security. good plugins get updated frequently. they add new
features.
They fix security holes. They fix bugs. They fix in compatibility with when
you go from one version of WordPress to the next, So it’s really
important to keep your plugins up to date for all of those reasons. But
one of the alert systems that FlyWheel has in place is they will send you
an alert if the current version of your plugin has security issues.
So you’ll get the email, you’ll see that, plugin such and such has security
alerts. We recommend you go update it right now, and then you can
update it as soon as they have it, because the time between , a security
issue is found until it’s fixed, you’re exposed. So you want to shorten that
gap.
So I think it’s really cool outside of their plugin update service, which is
an add on that you can get, they will actually alert you and it’s to both of
your advantages. You want to keep your site safe, but the C for all of the

sites on that server are, which is their priority. The better off their servers
are.
So they, they want to encourage you to keep your site safe. Keep it
optimized.
And so getting hacked via one of your plugins is real. here’s another
example. So way, way back in the day, when we were doing, just a
photography service, we had a separate web. It was actually one of my
first websites, independent of my whole entire marketing career. It was,
outside the companies that I had worked for over 10 years ago, we did
this, our site got hacked.
And when I say it got hacked right down to the root level of the server
that it was on. and it was because of one of the plugins didn’t get
updated and it was a tiny little site, We had maybe 25 or 50 hits per
month. But it was wrong, horrible to hacking. And so they hacked it.
So you have to realize just because your site is small, doesn’t mean it’s
not going to get hacked. They’re going to assume that your site could be
a gateway into a bigger site or a different site, on the same server,
because these guys know there’s multiple sites on a single. And so I
think that experience led us to having, the standards that we have today
to ensure that our sites are just as Bulletproof as possible, because I
don’t want to have her see anybody go through what we went through 10
years ago, with that photography site, we had to rebuild it from the
ground up.
they just took us out at the knees. So the next feature I’m going to talk to
you about with FlyWheel is, they automatically update your WordPress
version and your PHP version. Whenever there’s a new one comes out.
So when WordPress and PHP released new software versions, they go
in test it, make sure that they know how to migrate everything.
And then they start the process of migrating every single website on a
particular server. And then they notify you. Hey, we just upgraded your
site. Go take a look at it. And that’s what’s included because, again,
we’re pressing PHP or those foundation pieces and, it’s best practices to
keep those updated and it makes her servers run better.
if that is the case, plus those can be big security risks. When you get
that notification that the upgrade is complete. We do recommend that

you go in and go take a look at your website because sometimes the
update to WordPress or PHP can alter your website. maybe take a
section out, it breaks a link, so you need to go and just do a little retest.
And so as part of the services that we provide for our clients on top of
the hosting is every time there’s an update done, we go and we retest
the site and make sure. Identical to what it was before. And if there’s an
issue or a problem we solve, it will restore from backup. we will fix what
was broken.
but that is something that you would have to do yourself when you’re
hosting your own site on FlyWheel is they’ll do the upgrade, but they’ll
work with you. If you put in a support ticket saying, Hey, this got broken
during the upgrade. they’ll figure out if there’s something they need to
tweak on their backend, their support is.
So I did talk about plugin alerts, but I want to talk about an additional
cost feature that they provide. for plugin updates. It is really, really
important that you keep your plugins updated. and that is probably the
number one thing that falls by the wayside. For many websites and they
get out of date.
And then in two and three years, they’re so far out of date that you can’t
even update them. You actually literally have to start from scratch. So for
that additional monthly cost either,they’ll do it, I think either daily or
weekly or even monthly they’ll actually go in and make sure all your
plug-ins are updated.
so that everything keeps working and it. Usually most important, right
after you do a WordPress or a PHP update, because then all the plugins
have to make sure that they’re working with the latest version of
WordPress and you got to get those in there. Otherwise your site could
run kind of funky. So if you know that you can’t keep up with plugin
updates, get the extra feature it’s definitely worth. So the last thing I’m
going to share with you is, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, wow,
this is great. You’re probably not in our own FlyWheel. it’s super simple
and easy to get on FlyWheel because as soon as you open your account
with them, they offer free website.
what you’ll do is you’ll fill out their little form and they will actually take
your existing website and move it to their platform and then give you
access to it so you can check it and make sure it’s right. they’ll tweak

and fix things like if there’s an image broken or a link broken or
something, didn’t come over with.
for a couple of stuff. So when we did our migration from AWS to FlyWheel
for all of our sites, they did every single one of them for us. and some of
the sites came over beautifully and some like the recapture broke and
they had to fix that. so their team does all of that for you without any
extra charge.
so I think it’s a really good reason to consider this, because you really
don’t have to do a whole lot there. They’re really going to handhold you
through that process. The only thing I would make sure that you do is,
make sure all your plugins and your WordPress and your PHP are up-to-
date because they’re going to do that as part of it.
but if you do it yourself before you move, at least you can see if there’s
Differences, but again, their support is great. and then once the site is
good on the FlyWheel environment, all you have to do is change your
DNS records to switch from the old one to the new. So hopefully I have
inspired you to want a faster, safer, more robust website and all of this
can happen by switching to a FlyWheel host environment.
So let’s talk about some next steps that you can take to make this
happen. So first, if you’re unhappy with your current host and it’s a
WordPress website, you know, considering. Like I said before, the
migration is free. All you’re going to do and you get two months free. So
even if you take that first month, you migrate it, you fix it.
You’re not actually paying for your hosting until month three. and then
the second thing I would go back to is,Once you get to the new host
platform and you’re good to go. If you fall behind with your plugin
updates, consider adding on their plugin updaters, service, it’s a really
low cost compared to what it would take you to recover your site, rebuild
your website.
If you get hacked, or if you fall so far behind, that you can’t update it any
longer, we took over a client site and they hadn’t done a single
WordPress PHP or plugin update for over three years. We couldn’t move
the site. It would not load on the new servers because of the version
differences. and we couldn’t upgrade.

Where it lived because it was breaking and all this other stuff. So the
client actually had to pay us to completely rebuild his website, on our
servers. And then do the add on features that we wanted. so think about
it from that perspective as well. So here are my final thoughts for you on
this topic.
I know there’s a lot of hosts out there with bigger names and much lower
plans. but you get what you pay for those lower plan options come with
no additional features. They’re definitely not managed hosts versus you
got to do it all yourself. there are no interface features like what we’re
talking about here, where you knew you hit a button.
And the SSL certificate gets added. You fill out a form and your site gets
migrated, right? Those are all additional things that you have to pay for.
So it really isn’t going to cost you any less because you got to pay
someone to do all that stuff. And I’ve heard so many stories from people
about their sites, having issues with one of those hosts.
and then they felt like they were stuck. So I don’t want you to feel like
you’re stuck and I don’t want you to leave your hosting to chance. If
you’re really serious about marketing your business, then you’ve got to
make sure your website, which is like that center core piece of your
marketing is sitting in a stable and fast.
So here at, in coma, we like to give back to the business community. we
provide a 45 minute free consultation video conference where you can
ask us any questions about marketing. we could talk about hosting. We
can talk about plugins. We can talk about all sorts of stuff, but that 45
minutes is for you, so that you can get what you need from us.
And maybe you want to hire us to move and host your website. Who
knows. we also have a contact form on the website. So if you’ve got a
quick question or, and I always love these, if you have a suggestion for a
show, you got a question you want us to talk about. I love those when
they come. I mentioned at the beginning, we have the new blog for
marketing masterminds.
There’s a link in the show notes for that. Definitely go check it out. there
is content there for everyone and more and more is coming. so hopefully
you found this episode useful and helpful and enlightening. If you have
other business people that, you know, in your network that could also

benefit from this content, please share it because the purpose of what
we’re trying to do here at income is marketing strategy.
And at marketing masterminds is to elevate the entire small business
community. So thank you for listening and have an amazing day.