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Pantheon

Score8.6 out of 10

109 Reviews and Ratings

What is Pantheon?

Pantheon is a WebOps platform where marketers and developers collaborate to drive results. The vendor states that with Pantheon, site owners maximize their capacity to update website design and functionality, responding to market trends, catering to consumer behavior, and adding real value to the business's bottom line.


Today, companies compete on the basis of digital experiences, and the best results emerge from an agile build-test-learn process. Whether it's publishing content, automating processes, or optimizing UX, Pantheon aims to enable web teams to work in parallel and iterate in real time. They help companies engage their audience at the place it matters most — online.


Pantheon states they are the fastest growing platform for operating WordPress and Drupal sites — the open source technologies that deliver 35% of the web. Pantheon handles uptime, performance, scale, and security, and aims to make these broad community innovations accessible and valuable to all digital teams.

Powering more than 300,000 sites, and serving billions of pageviews each month, Pantheon boasts a strong customer retention rate with customers that include DocuSign, IBM, Google, Home Depot, Stitch Fix, Yale, Coach, ACLU, and IBM.

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Find out in seconds if your site is ready to launch. Use Launch Check to get recommendations and discover site issues fast with our report based on over 50 automated checks.
Our Developer Dashboard has everything you need to build, launch, and run Drupal and WordPress sites. Interface via SFTP or Git, deploy and scale your sites, and access tools like backups and one-click core updates. Easily add team members and control access.

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Solid Platform for Medium-Large Sites

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Pantheon to provide hosting services to our clients for whom we make websites and applications. Most of our clients are medium sized government agencies that need high availability and hosting solutions that allow multiple users with various permissions. Pantheon provides scaleable infrastructure with multi-user access was well as a development workflow that integrates well with our chosen tools and most of the time prevents us from having to manage any code except our own.

Pros

  • Hosting
  • DevOps
  • Drupal

Cons

  • Composer workflow
  • Customer service
  • Fine-grained permissions

Return on Investment

  • Less time deploying
  • Less time debugging application internals
  • More time talking to customer service

Alternatives Considered

Acquia Digital Experience Platform, DigitalOcean and Platform.sh

Other Software Used

PhpStorm, Sourcetree

Focus on content, let pantheon do the heavy lifting.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Use case: we primarily used it to leverage serverless CMS deployment for our subsite that is developed on WordPress. Scope Of Usage: we used it to host our blog and share updates with our community. we employe whole department of content writer and marketing folks, thus continues stream of blog post was estimated. if we had chosen traditional server, we'd have to scale it manually, This is where Pantheon comes in handy, it provides our site on serverless platform so we'll never have to worry about scalability. on top of it, we needed in-depth insights of applications. Pantheon provides performance monitoring using New Relic. this was epitome of this service because we were actively monitoring performance gain and bottlenecks. it aligned pretty well with our agenda of optimizing our website for performance across all device.

Pros

  • Performance monitoring.
  • CDN
  • Serverless

Cons

  • Since it can host CMS, it would be nice if it could also host Laravel.
  • Caching is not on-par compared with AWS Elasticache.

Return on Investment

  • Less DevOps task.
  • Focus on content.
  • Performance insight to improve the deliverables.

Alternatives Considered

AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon Lightsail

Other Software Used

Postman, PhpStorm, Laravel PHP Framework

Fair and balanced for Startups and MVP projects.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Pantheon as a devOps platform for a WordPress website running Buddypress and Learndash.

We also had a mobile app connected to the site.

The ability to have a platform with a staging site for testing before deploying was beneficial. It solved the problem of wasting time migrating sql databases manually or using plugins as one would typically have to do with WordPress normally.

Pros

  • Staging Site
  • Customer Service Team
  • User access tracking

Cons

  • Hosting power relative to the competition
  • Hosting locations relative to the competition
  • Server side firewalls

Return on Investment

  • Faster workflow communication between team members.
  • Slower load time comparing their shared hosting to other providers.
  • Easy site restoration for recovery tasks.

Alternatives Considered

Cloudways

Other Software Used

Cloudways, Semrush, SurferSEO

Pantheon Provides Speed and Peace of Mind

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a customer and also recommend Pantheon to our clients. We've grown to become a Premium Pantheon Partner, managing 30 websites hosted there. Pantheon has unrivaled security, support, and ease of use with their Dev, Test, and Live environments. Those environments make it a breeze to update portions, try new looks, or just keep code up to date without experimenting on the public site.

Pros

  • Usually respond to support tickets within minutes
  • Site hosting speed is fantastic
  • Upgrades to WordPress and plugins can be managed automatically

Cons

  • Pricing structure has too large of a jump between Basic and Performance plans
  • Have run into issues with prescribed WP updates not working through dashboard and having to do manually.
  • Pantheon site dashboard occasionally is unavailable (the site is never affected though)

Return on Investment

  • Gives us a solid hosting choice for websites we build for our clients
  • You don't have to worry about any catastrophic crashes or downtime; it's never happened to us
  • Support is very attentive and quick to respond

Alternatives Considered

GoDaddy

Other Software Used

Semrush, BrowserStack, Adobe Dreamweaver

Simplifying Complex Needs

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As we actively build and maintain websites for a large number of clients, we use Pantheon as a hosting option for the large majority of clients. In previous circumstances, we would be dealing with a smorgasbord of hosting platforms and server configurations, which becomes difficult to manage, difficult to replicate/resolve issues, and all-around tedious. Having everything under one roof has been instrumental to our success.

Pros

  • Integrated GIT / versioning
  • Tiered workflow for development and staging environments, for safe and rapid deployment
  • Consistent server configurations across projects, for easy diagnoses and speedy IT support

Cons

  • A little more control over features, e.g. htaccess, cron jobs, and general server configuration.
  • More integrated support for some niche solutions (e.g. WordPress multisite).
  • Allowing the ability to more easily clone or duplicate entire projects.

Return on Investment

  • Increased efficiency for rapid site management and deployment.
  • Improved safety (backups and workflows) to mitigate issues in a live, production environment.
  • Improved collaboration between developers, allowing for developers to easily merge changes when working side-by-side on a single project.

Alternatives Considered

WP Engine and Rackspace Managed Hosting

Other Software Used

WordPress

Usability