Flywheel Vs. SiteGround: Which provider is more suitable in 2021

You may consider investing in a hosting provider to promote your business website. Although there are lots of hosting providers available, you may want to compare Flywheel vs. SiteGround. It will be worth doing some research on both the providers to ensure selecting the best one. 

Flywheel Vs. SiteGround – An overview

Flywheel is a reputed brand. However, it offers only managed WP (WordPress) hosting services. SiteGround provides its clients with a wider range of hosting services to match their needs. You may think that focusing mainly on managed WP will be a great option. But it might not be the case.

Both hosts are found to take different approaches with regards to staging, collaboration, and security. In addition, SiteGround offers lots of add-ons, most of which are not desired. But being aware that your hosting provider offers just about everything required by your site boosts confidence. You can also benefit in the long term. 

Flywheel Vs. SiteGround – Pricing Structure & Plans offered

Both are known to offer several standardized and customized plans to their clients desiring bespoke solutions. 

Flywheel offers several packages, most of which target entry-level businesses, agencies, and freelancers. SiteGround also offers similar plans like the basic ‘Starter’ plan, the ‘GoGeek’ plan providing all essential features, and the ‘GrowBig’ plan to suit multi-site deployment. However, pricing between the two is not aligned. Hosting packages offered by SiteGround is quite affordable, thus attracting WP enthusiasts who seek budgeted plans. 

Although Flywheel offers managed WP at a higher rate, you can derive enhanced resources. Every plan level ensures increased visitor limitations. Moreover, Flywheel is found to limit bandwidth, something not done by SiteGround.

The latter will limit you with their acceptable use policy instead of the fixed cap provided on transfer. It is tough to estimate bandwidth, especially if you are a WordPress beginner. Hence, the lack of a hard cap provides that additional breathing space. 

When features offered are concerned, Flywheel’s offering is very much different. You can save a lot with SiteGround if you consider its plans and pricing structure. 

Therefore, SiteGround is more favorable as it offers flexible plans with a great pricing structure. In addition, although some plans might come with limited disk space, its less-stringent bandwidth usage policy offers your site greater flexibility. 

Flywheel Vs. SiteGround – Overall Performance

Speed is improved by optimizing Managed WP hosting. In addition, it is possible to reduce seconds from the site’s overall loading time by optimizing beyond the basics. The other factors that play an important role are data center location, CDNs, caching, and site loading time. 

Both hosts offer caching features. Flywheel claims to have an independent auto caching feature named ‘FlyCache.’ For SiteGround caching activation, you are to install and activate its WP plugin. 

Both providers provide CDNs (Content Delivery Network) integration features. Flywheel has come up with its CDN, referred to as ‘Fastly,’ integrating with FlyCache. On the other hand, SiteGround combines with Cloudflare. Both are found to offer excellent features, with Cloudflare enjoying its industry reputation. However, by providing some advanced, obscure features and full-page caching, Fastly edges its competitor easily in this segment. 

Freewheel has managed to install 5 data centers across five countries, while SiteGround owns 5 data centers in 4 countries. The latter offers fairly generic information with regards to its data center. However, Flywheel offers rough locations, but without many details about who the owner is or the type of physical security arranged. 

The next aspect to consider is the site uptime guarantee. Managed hosting customers are offered 99.9% uptime. For this, Flywheel uses Google Cloud. But SiteGround assures its clients of providing 99.99% uptime.  Flywheel allows monthly downtime of approximately 43 minutes before the guarantee comes into action.

SiteGround is said to allow 5 minutes of downtime in a month or even less! The historical uptime of Flywheel is around 99.96% and 99.99%. SiteGround is found to be more confident when uptime assurance is concerned when compared to Flywheel. 

Although Flywheel offers impressive CDN, SiteGround assures a better uptime experience. Hence, the latter emerges a winner in this category with its high uptime offered with managed WP plans. However, for the majority of business websites, Cloudflare is sufficient. 

Flywheel Vs. SiteGround – Features

With Managed WP hosting services, using WordPress becomes easy and hassle-free. The key here is the behind-the-scenes features. The way how WP hosting is packaged is different for both providers. 

Flywheel has designed a control panel and claims not to rely upon cPanel. Moreover, some interesting custom features are offered in its control panel, like collaborative tools considered unique to the host platform. 

Even SiteGround offers collaborative tools. You can easily ship a site, and hence is recommended with its hosting plan. But with Flywheel’s feature, you cannot retain account management. For its base, they use cPanel. However, they are shifting customers presently to a completely new control panel referred to as SiteTools.

The approaches used by both are held valid. However, it is necessary to understand that if you like working with cPanel, you will miss it a lot. Moreover, they do not provide their customers the opportunity to retain cPanel after fully rolling out the SiteTools. 

Another vital difference to note is the way how both providers offer staging environments. You can develop your site copy in this environment before incorporating necessary changes. This allows you to roll out easily and effortlessly the latest version. Also, your live site does not get impacted in any manner.

SiteGround is known to offer a limited staging environment. For instance, to use staging efficiently, you will require free disk space in a certain amount. They have also capped the number of operations to be carried out in a day. 

The staging environment of Flywheel is found to be much more flexible than SiteGround, without involving checks or caps. You might have plenty of plenty trying to incorporate changes within the working week on client sites. If so, then Flywheel’s approach is found to create less friction.

This provider allows you to create wireframes, referred to as Blueprints. To incorporate large changes, websites can be cloned effortlessly. But you developers might be interested in using cPanel and performing those things they have been doing for a long time. 

The next aspect to consider is Email hosting. Unfortunately, the flywheel does not support email hosting. Hence, if you desire that your domain has your business email linked with it, you will require another provider. Instead, you can rely on SiteGround’s email hosting services. They offer unlimited email account creation right from your domain. 

The final feature to consider in this category is ‘Backups,’ which is essential to protect your valuable data. Flywheel is known to take daily snapshots of your data automatically. It also allows you to add your own as and when required. Daily snapshots are taken by Siteground also. However, their rolling limit is about 30 a site. But they also provide their clients with backups on demand. An additional fee is to be paid if you have availed of the cheapest managed WP package. 

While SiteGround seems to have ditched cPanel, Flywheel provides a custom Control Panel. Hence, the right choice will be to avail the services of Flywheel since they have an upper edge over SiteGround in this category. Moreover, they have fewer limits while adopting ways to divide tasks amongst the team for smooth functioning. But they lack email hosting, an aspect that might compel you to switch on to SiteGround. 

Flywheel Vs. SiteGround – Support

There are times when your site might experience technical issues. In such cases, you should be in a position to access prompt support from experienced and knowledgeable professionals. Otherwise, your site is likely to fail miserably to retain clients. Hence, support is considered to be the ultimate crucial aspect associated with hosting. 

You may be provided with online help materials to tackle issues. They will be sufficient enough to deal with smaller issues. But what about major problems and during pressure times. 

Flywheel provides an ebook library combined with some knowledge base in the form of articles covering each topic. You can get familiarized with its features by accessing its help area. However, it does not cover major issues that you need immediate resolutions too. 

SiteGround claims to have a massive help system. It boasts of having 4,500+ articles that cover almost every question imagined about hosting problems and features. When compared to Flywheel, SiteGround has a broader service catalog. In addition, they cover major obscure problems. 

Both Flywheel and SiteGround offer round-the-clock support for 365 days. Flywheel offers live chat and ticket-based support, but not over the phone. SiteGround provides ticket and live-chat support. They also offer phone support through local contact numbers, thereby minimizing long-distance calling fees.

Both hosts have great historical uptime figures. You can get access to Flywheel support even by registering as an anonymous visitor. Their team also provides prompt responses, which is less than a minute. But SiteGround does have a wait time which can be a bit frustrating at times.

They will view you as their registered user, can get access to your domains and account instantly. This will help save some precious time and not require you to provide vital information to pull up your record. Thus, solving complex problems becomes easy and quick with SiteGround. 

Responses availed from both the provider is within acceptable limits. Moreover, their live attendants are knowledgeable, friendly, and helpful. 

But SiteGround’s Phone Support feature tends to beat the Ticket/Chat service of Flywheel, thus making them a clear winner in this category. They have invested a lot in their customer support and assistance over time, and it shows through their services rendered.

So even if you are under pressure and need assistance in a hurry, you can look forwards to getting quick help from SiteGround officials. 

Flywheel Vs. SiteGround – Security

The truth is all sites and blogs are vulnerable to exploits, viruses, and hacks. To ensure adequate protection, you need to check out the tools and safeguards that both providers offer. 

You do not have to spend precious time trying to update WordPress, including its plugins. It is done automatically by both providers. However, the earlier plugin versions might have security holes, thus making your site vulnerable to unwanted elements. It is the responsibility of the host to ensure they provide their clients with secure servers. 

Flywheel and SiteGround offer optional two-factor authentication (2FA) features. To log in, you will require inputting a security code that is automatically generated and a valid password. 

Flywheel eliminates all malware present for free. This is valuable for those who are frequently plagued with hacking issues. SiteGround provides its clients with an annual plan for which there is an additional amount charged for malware cleanup.

They offer optional automatic updates. If you can wait until it is declared bug-free, you can skip the WP version. They screen for minor and major issues at the firewall level. New rules are introduced to avoid attacks since the WP community is prone to exploits.

With plugins, you can include things such as 2FA to your website. Thus, it offers enhanced site security, and you will be in a better position to know the functioning of your plugins. Generally,  the host’s systems are closed off, thus providing you with greater control.

This means you can use your already paid plugins if you have some preference. On different sites, you can also mix different plugins.

Both offer excellent security allowing you to have peace of mind. But it is SiteGround that emerges as a winner in this category over Flywheel. 

Flywheel Vs. SiteGround – Conclusion

So, which one is suitable for your business? Both providers offer top-notch managed WP hosting plans. Going through the above details can help you to understand the differences as to how WP hosting is packaged. Differences are also noticed in how each host tries to secure their clients’ sites.

Flywheel offers strong collaboration features while allowing you to have greater control over your site. The Flywheel can make sense if you rely on collaborative tools heavily to serve clients in large numbers and possess money. It helps bring your hosting, administration, development, and billing into one place.

However, to derive value for money, SiteGround can be a much better choice.