In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Dusty Davidson, co-founder and CEO of Flywheel, a managed WordPress hosting company that caters to agencies and designers. Davidson last appeared on the show three years ago when the company had yet to launch to the public.
In the interview, Davidson tells us what he’s learned in the three years since launching the company. We discuss current trends in the industry and how hosting providers are affecting the WordPress ecosystem.
Davidson explains how the company maintains its stellar reputation for customer support and the impacts of being listed on the WordPress.org recommended hosting page. Near the end of the interview, we learn how Flywheel is implementing Let’s Encrypt to easily provide SSL certificates for customers.
Stories Discussed:
LinkedIn Learning Is Offering Free Access This Week to Its Library of More Than 5,000 Courses
Plugins Picked By Marcus:
Import Meetup Events is an add-on for The Events Calendar and Events Manager plugins. It allows you to automatically import events from Meetup.com into The Events Calendar or Events Manager.
Click to Clipboard allows you to copy paragraphs from your site’s main content to the clipboard to use elsewhere.
Archive Control allows you to customize your archive listing by modifying your Archive title, adding a featured image, including content before or after the list. You can also change the order of display and include pagination, adjust the terms, and more.
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Next Episode: Wednesday, November 2nd 9:30 P.M. Eastern
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Listen To Episode #252:
[powerpress]
A nice interview. I have used flywheel with two clients and I can say the experance has been really nice. Especially for the clients (none technically minded) who have experance and worked with cpanel before. For them the on-boarding (that i controlled) was easy and everything else just got out of there way and let them focus on the site. Frankly i prefer the experance as well.
The only couple of things I might wish to see change is a slight increase in the number of monthly visitors allowed on there small plan. Its that plan that makes them really attractive to some of my clients since its hard to find others like it in the managed wordpress hosting. But the difference between it and the next plan up is rather large, and it would bring better peace of mind to clients who aren’t certain what there monthly visitors count will be.
Two things I would love to see them add to the service relate to manual site migrations and backups. I would love the ability, somewhere to uncompress an archive thats been manually uploaded. The manual migration process for flywheel (vs them doing it for you which is nice but sometimes deadlines prohibit it), requires you to sftp the files but it would be a huge time saver to be able to upload a compressed file and then uncompress it.
For backup, and this was discussed on Office Hours, is the option to have the backups (or a copy) Flywheel makes, offloaded to a third party that i or my client can control. This is a place where flywheel could do it better then a plugin and simplify the process. I think of how ManageWP offers the option to have a copy of the backup they make transferred to an S3 bucket you provide. Something like that would provide a lot of peace of mind. Flywheel does a nice job with the backups but there are situations that flywheel can’t control where backups your in control are important. They do allow some backup plugins but this would again make for a nicer experance.