Flywheel alternative: benefits of choosing Kinsta

Kinsta is developer-friendly

Many of us at Kinsta are developers ourselves, that’s why from day one we’ve built our tools and dashboard with WordPress developers in mind. We provide the following features and accessibility to make your workflow more efficient, not all of which are available at Flywheel:

• We don’t have restrictions in place on critical files. Flywheel locks down your wp-config.php file and doesn’t allow to make changes to it.
• We allow you to use custom setups like Bedrock and Trellis, as well as starter themes such as Sage.
• SSH access, Git, and WP-CLI on all plans from Starter to Enterprise. You can also add your SSH keys in the MyKinsta dashboard. These provide a more secure way of logging into a server and eliminate the need for a password.
• We allow you to run a different version of PHP for each live site and staging site and switching between PHP engines takes just one-click. There is no need to reach out to our support team.
• Access to phpMyAdmin to manage and run queries against your MySQL database. Flywheel provides a stripped down and limited version of this in their dashboard.
• You can restore automatic backups to production as well as staging.
• We leave post and page revisions enabled by default. While we recommend limiting or disabling these, we believe this should be your choice.
• Loading your site over a reverse proxy is possible, and we have many clients who do so.
• Faster search with the Elasticsearch add-on and faster database performance with the Redis add-on.
• Five different types of backups to keep your data safe and up to date: automatic daily backups, optional hourly backups, manual backups, system generated backups, and downloadable backups.

You might notice that we don't offer email hosting at Kinsta. Why not? Because this can cause all sorts of problems for you down the road. Blacklisted IPs, email deliverability issues, complicated email authentication configurations, and even a strain on server resources are a few that come to mind. If you want your business to succeed, you should utilize the best tools and services that are already available on the market. A few we typically recommend are G Suite, SendGrid, MailChimp, and MailGun.

Basic transactional emails, such as password resets and eCommerce purchase emails will work fine at Kinsta, but not bulk email sending or hosted email. We focus on what we do best and that is providing high-performance hosting and world-class support. Don't worry, we have plenty of excellent guides to get your email up and going!

Like Kinsta, Flywheel doesn’t provide email hosting but allows for a limited number of transactional emails. The big difference here is the number of emails we both allow:

• Kinsta’s Starter and Pro plans allow up to 150 transactional emails per day or (4,500/month) while Flywheel’s Tiny plan only allows up to 2,000 a month. Their Personal plan does however allow up to 5,000/month.
• Kinsta’s Business plans allows up to 1,000 transactional emails per day (30,000/month) while Flywheel’s Professional plan only allows up to 15,000/month.
• Kinsta’s Enterprise plans allow up to 3,000 transactional emails per day (90,000/month) while Flywheel’s larger plans are custom built.

Again, if you're worried about crossing these limits, we always recommend using one of the third-party transaction email providers or email marketing software tools we mentioned above.

Feature comparison overview

Here is a quick overview of some of the key differences between Kinsta and Flywheel.

You can save more on your monthly hosting bill at Kinsta. We give annual plans two free months while Flywheel only gives one month. Kinsta also has huge discounts for nonprofits and open source projects. You can get a 15% recurring discount or 15% off in addition to the two months free if paying annually. Flywheel does offer discounts but doesn’t make this information available to the public.

Free migrations

For a limited time Kinsta is excited to offer unlimited free migrations to all Flywheel hosting customers wanting to make the move to Kinsta. This offer is valid through March 31, 2019.

Unless you’re a developer with time to burn, it’s much safer to let our team take care of everything for you. It doesn't matter if you have one WordPress site or 50! Moving your site usually won’t incur any downtime and we’ll help you inspect your migrated site prior to going live.

The support team has been fantastic for helping our migration and setup. As we're not technical, we don't have too much time to spend learning how to do these types of things. Luckily the Kinsta support team walked us through every step of our site migration and rebranding.

Lucy Blevins

Ph.D. and Author, Dietprobe.com

Expert Support

Flywheel support is Monday – Friday, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. with emergency support available 24x7. We don't think this is acceptable and therefore take a proactive approach at Kinsta. Our support team is available 24x7, 365 days a year, including evenings and weekends. We treat every website as mission-critical, whether you're a blogger or Fortune 500 company.

Kinsta also does support a little different than everyone else. We don't have level 1 or level 2 support reps. Our entire support team is made up of WordPress developers and Linux hosting engineers many of whom have managed their own servers, created themes and plugins, and contributed back to core. This ensures you’ll receive expert advice from someone who actively uses and develops with WordPress. Every Kinsta client gets to chat with the same team members that support our large enterprise and Fortune 500 companies. In fact, we hire less than 1% of applicants who apply. You won’t find better support anywhere else!

Kinsta is truly fantastic. A web host par excellence. I've been working with web hosts for more than a decade, and it's truly difficult to find one that is friendly to developers, prioritizes performance AND allows you the flexibility to build a complex website. Yet what stands out more than anything else is their support team. It's not often that support staff knows way more than I do about making WordPress and BuddyPress work well. And they are accessible in real time, creatively work to solve problems, and even notice things unrelated to the specific issue I ask about that could be improved. I smile every time I work with them. And smiling is hard to do when a server is melting down. Knowing Kinsta has my back makes even the worst server issues tolerable!

Vanessa Harris

Product Manager, Google

Kinsta also monitors your sites' uptime every minute which means that our slowest response time is 5 minutes to any downtime that may occur. Our staff is alerted instantly and quite often we start resolving the issue before you even contact us. And yes, this includes evenings and weekends!

Wondering why we don't offer phone support? We have found that keeping support solely online allows us to better help you troubleshoot your website in a speedy and more efficient manner, as our engineers are able to focus all of their energy on solving your support concerns with the fewest number of distractions and interruptions possible. This, in turn, means that your support requests are ultimately resolved faster. We believe it wouldn’t be possible to provide the same effective assistance over the phone.

Moving to Kinsta was crucial to our online presence. The performance and the outstanding support team (who seems to solve any issue in a matter of minutes) is the reason why every aspect of our online presence has improved; customer satisfaction, income, site maintenance and various SEO measures all improved solely by moving to Kinsta.

Araz Rawshani

MD, PhD, ECG Learning

Kinsta has a global presence

Kinsta was the first managed WordPress host in the industry to utilize Google Cloud Platform exclusively. It's no surprise that our competitors, such as Flywheel, are now adopting the same infrastructure. However, as with any new platform, their team is bound to encounter bumps in the road. Kinsta has already ironed out all of the kinks, making our platform, combined with Google Cloud, the most stable and optimized WordPress solution on the market!

Kinsta rolls out new Google Cloud Platform locations the moment they are available. We are proud to offer 19 data centers around the globe, extending across five continents. All locations are available across all plans (with no extra or hidden charges), starting from as low as $30/mo! You can also choose a different data center of each of your sites. Current locations:

Everything at Kinsta is interconnected over the highly reliable Google Cloud Platform premium tier network. This is designed to minimize distance and hops, resulting in faster and more secure global transport of your data. Beware, some hosting providers might opt for Google’s “standard tier” network service without telling you to cut costs, but we believe in only utilizing the best here at Kinsta.

Choosing a data center near you and your visitors will result in faster SFTP download and upload speeds, making file transfers quick and painless. You're back-end WordPress dashboard will also feel more snappy and responsive, especially when uploading files to the media library.

Turbocharging your content delivery

Kinsta cares about the performance of your site, not just from our data center, but at every point around the globe. That’s why we partnered up with KeyCDN, a premium HTTP/2 and IPv6-enabled content delivery network (CDN), and include free bandwidth across all of our plans.

KeyCDN’s content delivery architecture was built from the ground up with a focus on high-performance and designed for high throughput and low latency. When enabled, your content will be delivered and cached from their 35 POPs around the globe, this includes all regions: America, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia!

Flywheel currently uses MaxCDN as their CDN provider and it only has 19 locations. Some regions aren’t included.

Our CDN also automatically helps protect against bad bots as well as checks all the boxes when it comes to industry standards such as GZIP and HPACK compression.

Best affiliate program in the industry

Kinsta has become one of the fastest growing managed WordPress hosts thanks in part to the many happy customers helping to spread the word. Whether you're an agency, freelancer, or blogger, Kinsta is proud to offer true profit sharing with one of the highest paying affiliate programs in the hosting industry.

You earn $50 to $500 after every signup based on the type of plan you refer. On top of that, you get a 10% monthly recurring commission for the lifetime of the customer you referred, enabling you to build passive income.

We never settle for anything less than perfection at Kinsta. That's why we built our WordPress hosting affiliate dashboard from the ground up, meaning you don't have to mess with another confusing and cluttered 3rd-party platform. This allows our developers to easily build in new features as needed to help you earn even more.

Flywheel also has an affiliate program in which you can earn up to $500 per referral source, as well as secondary commissions. However, they don't offer any way to build passive income. If you're an affiliate marketer, you know this is where the real money is!