I love trying out new services but I hate how secretive people are about the prices of their ‘beta’ services. Being so secrective means I’m not even going to bother trying the free account.
Flywheel Hosting
Flywheel sounds pretty awesome actually. Possibly even worth me moving off my Media Temple GS. Unfortunately I see nothing about price on their site. Not even a range of pricing.
I accept that you’re starting out and you may not have a solid number picked yet. You certainly know how low you can go before you’re not making any money at all though. You know what your competitors are charging for their hosting services.
How about a statement that says you’ll be inline with competitors like Page.ly or WP Engine? That would at least let me guess at my costs.
I run a business if I can’t evaluate costs of a service I have no idea if my total cost of ownership is higher or lower by moving to a new host.
No business should be getting in to something without evaluating the total cost of ownership. It’s simply irresponsible. I’ll check back on Flywheel when I have a chance but it’s something I can’t properly evaluate yet.
2 responses to “Where’s the total cost of ownership Flywheel”
Hey Curtis,
I agree wholeheartedly that the lack of published pricing (even if stated that it’s subject to change) is frustrating.
There’s a pricing PDF that’s been flying around on the interwebs, but I’m not sure why it’s not linked to from the Flywheel site.
http://getflywheel.com/wp-content/flywheel_pricing.pdf
Frustration with pricing aside, I’ve been very happy with both the customer service and the hosting service I’ve received during beta.
I’ve only had two irritations so far:
1) Don’t have permissions to add any folders/files to my host directory. It’s just the WP install. Period. (Discovered this when trying to install YOURLs).
2) The account comes with free site staging, but there’s no demo site capability. (The staging sites expire and are deleted after a couple of weeks unless they’re paid for). I’d like to be able to run demo sites off sub domains. I think this issue will be addressed/fixed later.
If you do a trial with them, I’d be interested to hear your follow-up thoughts. As a developer, you may want more server access than you’ll get on a managed host?
After our Twitter conversation on the weekend they said they were going to email me pricing (I had already written the post). Still don’t have that email.
I keep looking at WordPress managed hosting like WP Engine and Page.ly. I’ve put clients on both of them and either is great. One thing I use my server for is to host a bunch of my Git projects as a backup. If I move to managed hosting and drop my Media Temple GS I’d have to start paying for Github private repositories or come up with another level of backup.
Paying for Github seems silly when I already have a paid Beanstalk account (the FTP deployment is wicked awesome).
I’m cheap as any business owner should be so I’ve really got to see an advantage if I’m going to end up increasing expenses.