Flywheel

Flywheel is a managed WordPress host built for web designers, freelancers and agencies. Started in Omaha, Nebraska, it was acquired by WP Engine in 2019 and runs as a WP Engine brand, keeping its own dashboard, plans and workflow. Sites run on Google Cloud behind a Fastly CDN, from data centres in North America, the UK, the EU and Australia.

The product is shaped around client work: billing transfer to the client, collaborator roles, reusable site blueprints, demo sites and the free Local app for building WordPress offline. Plans are fixed tiers bundling staging, nightly backups with a retention window and SSL. As on most managed WordPress hosts, a list of plugins is disallowed — mostly caching, backup and security plugins that clash with the platform’s own stack — and shell access runs through a restricted gateway rather than a full shell.