Web hosting startup Flywheel today left its private beta and opened its hosting services to the public.
Flywheel‘s WordPress web hosting services are ready to fully get rolling. Focused on premium offerings for designers, freelancers and agencies, the Omaha-based startup today opened its site to public signups.
Its private beta began in April with more than 150 design firms and freelancers. CEO and co-founder Dusty Davidson (also co-founder of Silicon Prairie News) said that period brought a number of infrastructure enhancements, a run-through of a major WordPress update that went off without a hitch and the creation of a database management tool that was a top user request. Founded in August 2012, the company of three—Davidson (left) started Flywheel with Rick Knudston (middle) and Tony Noecker (right)—closed an angel round of funding in February, with Linseed Capital named as an investor.
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Everything the team does is geared toward providing more value than what has become the norm in hosting, Davidson said. Pricing may be cheap at about $2 per month, he said, but with that price typically comes poor performance and poor customer service, cramming lots of sites onto a single server.
“It became a race to ‘Who could charge the absolute bottom price?’” Davidson told Silicon Prairie News.
To reverse that trend, Flywheel has decided to focus solely on WordPress. Davidson cited it as the most popular content management system in the world, and “it’s the only thing designers develop for.” They’re also honed in on customer service, performance and security. For designers and freelancers always working with others, Flywheel aims to make collaboration easy, allowing the addition of people as collaborators to accounts instead of passing around user names and passwords. It also wants designers to stop worrying about technical issues, taking care of updates, plug-ins and potential hacks.
To make that service-first approach a reality, Davidson said Flywheel will hire a “handful more” employees by the end of the year to cover customer service, server administration and marketing.
A number of Silicon Prairie companies—Cremalab, Oxide, Lemon.ly and MindMixer—have already bought in. For those interested, monthly plans come in at $15, 30 and $75 depending on traffic for the site, with each including all features and support.
Credits: Photos courtesy Flywheel.
