WordPress-as-a-service tip: Flywheel

flywheelAt work I was asked to provide advice on WordPress hosting. As we don’t have in-house LAMP-experience and as I didn’t want to have to take care of server operations myself (been there, done that), I decided to look into WordPress as a service solutions. To make things a tad more complicated, hosting had to be in a European data-center as we wanted optimal performance for our local customers and as our Privacy Officer requires all company data to be in Europe.
I contacted several US companies, but eventually Flywheel came out on top; they confirmed they could host in Europe (Amsterdam), seemed pretty eager, had a great package and they could provide me with a test-account to play around with their solution. And so I did; I set up a stock WordPress 3.9.x with Autoptimize and WP YouTube Lyte (call me prejudiced, but I like my own plugins), imported a bunch of posts from this blog and had WebPageTest be the judge.
The results were quite impressive;

Document CompleteFully Loaded
Load timeFirst byteStart renderDOM elemsTimeReqsBytes InTimeReqsBytes In
First View (Run 3)0.457s0.120s0.292s9260.457s473 KB1.008s12152 KB

0.120s until first byte, 0.292s start render and 0.457s doc complete? Sweet! So yeah, given those numbers, their offering and the fact they can deploy to a datacenter in Europe I do think Flywheel is a great choice for those who are looking for WordPress-as-a-service (well, PAAS really) solution!

4 thoughts on “WordPress-as-a-service tip: Flywheel”

  1. Well, in comparison with Hostinger or x10Hosting it’s not eye-caching, even little bit expensive. With half of their prices you can have SSD VPS.

    Reply
    • Interesting, but those aren’t wordpress-as-a-service hosters? Although I love running a VPS myself, but I explicitely wanted to avoid having to worry about installing, configuring and continuously updating the LAMP-stack for this company blog. Hence wordpress-as-a-service.

      Reply
  2. Frank, did you check out Webfaction? They have a data center in Amsterdam, they offer one-click WordPress installation, and they’re cheaper. Plus you can configure their setup in many ways, including serving static media via Nginx, which makes it very fast.

    Reply
    • Thanks Peter. I was explicitely searching for a specialized managed WordPress-service, which Webfaction is not, although their offering does seem interesting in a general hosting context.

      Reply

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