At this time last year, Flywheel Hosting opened its doors to the public. Today, the company announced it has secured $1.2M in seed funding. The round was led by Linseed Capital, with participation from the Nebraska Angels, Ludlow Ventures out of Detroit, Lightbank and Hyde Park Venture Partners out of Chicago, and Rose Paul Ventures out of NYC.
Flywheel will use the funding to expand their team and infrastructure. Also as part of the announcement, Flywheel now offers bulk pricing plans. Bulk pricing starts with 10 sites with 150,000 visits for $100 a month and 25 sites with 500,000 visits for $250 a month. Flywheel hosting plans for small sites begin at $15 a month for sites with 5,000 visits. Since the customer base is mainly website designers and agencies, these new plans make sense, especially for managing all of their client sites in one location.
Managing A Growth Phase
Some customers of WPEngine have suggested that the company’s rapid growth resulted in lackluster support and reliable service during the height of its popularity. Earlier this year, an article on the WPEngine blog entitled Growth Is Hard, explained the growing pains the company experienced.
I asked the co-founder and CEO of Flywheel, Dusty Davidson, how he plans to manage the next phase of Flywheel.
We’re very aware of how hard it is to scale a support organization. We’re investing heavily in great people, great automation, tools, and other things to do our absolute best to provide the level of support that our customers have come to expect. It’s core to our mission to provide service at that level, even at scale and we’ll do what it takes to accomplish that.
It’s rare to see so many people compliment a webhosting provider but that’s what I’ve witnessed over the past year. Through Twitter, WordCamps, and other venues, customers appear to be unanimously happy with Flywheel. It will be interesting to see if the company can scale at a fast rate while maintaining their signature level of quality service and support.
Tell Us About Your Experience With FlyWheel
With so many companies in the managed WordPress hosting market, it’s encouraging to see a startup proving to be a hit amongst its customers. Instead of going after everyone, FlyWheel has carved out a niche within the market and is doing well. If you are a current or existing customer of FlyWheel Hosting, tell us about your experience in the comments.
Congrats to Dusty and his team! Love seeing this happening in the WP Community and well deserved for Flywheel.