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Cloudways and Flywheel are two renowned WordPress hosting companies. They both offer a variety of benefits and features that make them stand out from the rest.

Choosing between the two is difficult unless you are entirely aware of their differences. I have done in-depth research on the two services, and I will walk you through all my findings in a bit in this post.

Cloudways Vs Flywheel

Cloudways is a reliable Managed Cloud Hosting Platform that was started in 2009. The platform emphasizes creating exceptional experiences for users with unmatched performance, reliability, choice, and 24/7 support. Over the years, Cloudways has catered to the needs of many growing agencies and eCommerce businesses.

Cloudways Home

Established in 2010, Flywheel is an excellent Managed WordPress Hosting company. The service is ideal for designers and creative agencies since it helps them quickly build, scale, and manage hundreds of WordPress sites quickly and rapidly.

Cloudways Vs Flywheel: Performance

Now, it’s time to find out the performance details of the two services. I hosted a demo site on both platforms for more than a year and conducted a series of the performance test. I will walk you through the test results one by one.

Demo sites details:

  • Demo sites hosted on Flywheel Tiny plan ($13/mo.) and Cloudways DigitalOcean plan ($10/mo.)
  • Test period: 30th June 2021 – 30th June 2022 (12 months)
  • TTFB and uptime are tracked through Pingdom. ( 1400 checks in a day, a total of 5,11,000 checks in a year)

Both Cloudways and Flywheel offer faster TTFB

The speed of a site or the Server Response Time (TTFB) of a site holds a lot of importance in hosting since visitors love sites that load faster. I tested the Server Response Time of the two websites using the Pingdom tool. My Flywheel site responded exceptionally well, with an average response time of 296ms.

My Cloudways site also performed very well, with an average response time of 302ms.

You can see that the performance has been pretty close, and both services are highly reliable in terms of server response time.

Flywheel has better uptime than Cloudways.

Next up, I looked at the uptime, for we all know what an essential factor uptime is. As I tested the uptime of the two services, my Flywheel site responded with an uptime of 100%, while my Cloudways site recorded an uptime of 99.99%.

Even though both services have reliable uptime, for sure, Flywheel is comparatively a little better than Cloudways in terms of uptime. Further, over the years, users have hardly faced any downtime with Flywheel.

Cloudways has better global TTFB than Flywheel.

Many websites drive their traffic from multiple Global locations. This is why it’s essential to test the Global TTFB of the hosting services. I conducted a Global TTFB test on both websites. I pinged the sites from ten different global locations.

Flywheel
Cloudways

My Flywheel website responded very well and reflected an average TTFB of 464.24 ms, while my Cloudways website recorded an average TTFB of 390.15 ms. Hence, you can see that the company has better Global TTFB than Flywheel.

Both Cloudways and Flywheel offer faster Core Web Vitals score

Offering visitors an exceptional user experience is significant for sites these days since user experience is an essential ranking factor. Testing the Core Web Vitals of a hosting service helps us understand the kind of help sites hosted on it can get from it in terms of user experience.

When I tested the Core Web Vitals of the two services, my Flywheel website recorded a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 0.362 s, a ‘Total Blocking Time’ of 0.000s, and a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0.

While my Cloudways site recorded a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 0.583 s, a ‘Total Blocking Time’ of 0 s, and a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0. Both services have excellent Core Web Vitals, for sure. However, Flywheel has slightly better Core Web Vitals than Cloudways.

Cloudways Vs Flywheel: Features

Flywheel control panel is simple compared to Cloudways

Control Panel has a significant place in hosting, and when I looked at the control panels of the two services, I found Flywheel with a comparatively easy-to-use control panel than Cloudways. Customers can install WordPress sites with just a single click. Besides, you will find all the essential tools in one place in the Flywheel dashboard.

Cloudways control panel, on the other hand, is a bit complex to use and may not be ideal for beginners. However, once you get the hang of it, you will find it much more advanced and user-friendly.

Cloudways offers 65 data centers, whereas Flywheel offers only 5 locations

When you are up to hosting your website, you must look for the closest server to your target audience. Flywheel comes with 5 global data center locations.

Cloudways, on the other hand, has over 65 data center locations across the Globe. Hence, customers have more servers to choose from them.

Both Cloudways and Flywheel offer the fastest CDN

CDNs effectively enhance website content-delivery speed, which is why most hosting services use CDN these days. Flywheel has its CDN solution with powerful POPs in conjunction with SSD-powered servers and consistent speed optimization. The provider offers its CDN for free and comes with full-page caching by default. They use FastlyCDN as the CDN provider, and it’s one of the fastest CDN in the world.

Cloudways, on the other hand, doesn’t have a free CDN. The service has an in-built CDN solution. Their CDN is powered by Cloudflare Enterprise and costs $4.99/site/month. Though CDN is paid one, the company offers an enormous bandwidth, while the bandwidth is limited in Flywheel plans.

In total, the Flywheel and Cloudways have an equal number of pros and cons. So, both are winners here.

Flywheel offers free backups.

When choosing a hosting service, you must look for a great backup system. You may lose your website data at any time unless you have a reliable backup system in place. Flywheel comes with a perfect backup system. The feature is free on all plans—the platform stores every backup point for 30 days. Besides, customers have direct access to the backup points to restore whenever needed.

Unlike Flywheel, Cloudways doesn’t offer backups for free and charges $0.33 per GB for backup. However, if we consider the backup system, it’s pretty reliable, backed by automated backup and an external storage network.

Both Cloudways and Flywheel offer staging sites.

Regarding staging, both Flywheel and Cloudways offer the feature for free, and the process is pretty simple on both platforms. Both services allow you to create unlimited staging sites. Customers can easily make staging sites, test modifications, and deploy final changes to the live site.

Security

Moving ahead, it’s time to talk about website security. Many online threats constantly surround your website, and your website is at constant risk of being attacked or hacked unless your site is hosted on a hosting platform with a robust security system. 

When I looked into the security features of the two services, I found both with reliable security features. Flywheel does a great job in preventing sites against DDoS, Bruteforce, and malware attacks backed by excellent server-level security, free malware removal, two-factor authentication, Limited login attempts, Intelligent IP Blocking, and Managed WordPress Updates.

Cloudways security features include dedicated firewalls, Let’s Encrypt SSL, IP Whitelisting, Regular Security Patching, Two-Factor Authentication, Bot Protection against DoS, and brute force.

Support

Flywheel has an excellent support team of experts to address the customers’ issues 24/7 through tickets and live chats. Cloudways also has one of the finest technical support teams in the industry.

The Cloudways support team does a great job in assisting the customers 24/7 through ticketing and live chat. It’s also worth mentioning that both Flywheel and Cloudways have good documentation for the customers to refer to quickly.

Cloudways Vs Flywheel Pricing

Cloudways plan starts at $10/month and offers unlimited site installations on all plans, whereas Flywheel comes from $13/month and offers limited installations if paid annually.

Get a discount on Cloudways hosting when you sign up for a new account. Flywheel offers 2 months of additional hosting with their annual billing.

Cloudways or Flywheel – Which is Best?

In terms of performance, Cloudways and Flywheel are equally good. Feature-wise, Flywheel is easy to use, whereas, with Cloudways, a learning curve is needed.

Considering the value for money, Cloudways is the ultimate best compared to Flywheel.

Even with their $10/mo. One can install unlimited sites, whereas the Flywheel plan has limited monthly installations.

In conclusion, If you’re passionate about blogging and writing content is your ultimate aim, then choose Flywheel; keep yourself distant from tech stuff. If you need more control over your server, then go with Cloudways.

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