Pantheon is a web hosting provider specifically for WordPress and Drupal sites. We compiled Pantheon reviews from around the web to determine what customers think about the company and compared the most common pricing options for small business owners.
For an in-depth comparison of three top hosting sites for small businesses, read our web hosting buyer’s guide.
Pantheon Customer Reviews
Overall experience: Great
Ease of use: Great
Customer service: Great
Pricing: High
Summary of Pantheon Customer Reviews
We scoured available reviews online and found that Pantheon has mainly positive ratings. Here’s what we found:
What Pantheon does well:
Users who recommend Pantheon said that they really liked the service’s optimization with Drupal and WordPress. Users recommended Pantheon’s reliable servers and great website performance. Great customer service was also cited.
What Pantheon does not do well:
Users who left negative reviews cited that customer service tickets take a while sometimes. It is notable, however, that negative reviews on Pantheon were rare and most users really liked their services in general.
Most Helpful Positive Review
A user who left a positive review on the review site, G2 Crowd, said that Pantheon makes it easy to administer, update, and deploy changes to multiple Drupal websites under a subscription. He mentioned that the develop-test-live workflow Pantheon has created is like magic, since code changes and databases can be transferred from one environment to another easily. The user shared that the one-click backup restoration feature has saved him at least once from accidental data loss, and restoring from backup was so simple, that he gained greater confidence in the system.
Most Helpful Negative Review
A user who left a negative review on G2 Crowd said that support is his only issue with Pantheon saying that a reliable host should have helpful support. He shared that they should have customer service agents that have technical knowledge and are familiar with the Pantheon setup, including platform limitations.
Pantheon Reviews From Users Around the Web
Here are a few other resources for finding helpful Pantheon reviews from customers. We rated the review sites on a scale from poor to excellent based on how trustworthy and useful the reviews seemed.
| *Average rating as of date article was written: July 9, 2017 | |||
Pantheon Pricing
Pantheon has only one shared hosting option fit for small businesses, which costs $25 per month per website. It doesn’t have published packages for long-term contracts and only indicates a per-month pricing.
| Personal | |
|---|---|
| Monthly Pricing | $25 per month/per website |
| Monthly Visitors | Up to 10,000 |
| Storage | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth | Uses high-performance edge cache that speeds up sites and protects them from traffic spikes |
| Integrations | GitHub, CircleCI, Slack, Jira |
| Customer Support | 24/7 Chat Support |
Pantheon’s pricing is on a per-website basis so users have to pay depending on how many websites they plan to host with Pantheon.
The Personal Plan is ideal for sites that have an average of 10,000 visitors a month. Features include unlimited storage, and third party integrations with apps mentioned above. Users who have websites on a different hosting site will also enjoy free migration services.
Pantheon seems to have great functionalities in place and is trusted by giant companies such as Cisco, IBM and Dell, so it is an ideal option for small businesses that want a high performing site and are willing to pay a little more.
Small Business Web Hosting Buyer’s Guide
Not sure if Pantheon is the right small business web hosting site for you? Check out our in-depth comparison of three top hosting sites for small businesses in our web hosting buyer’s guide.
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Nicolas Jonas
1. That git system can actually be very useful to stage and test a site properly and risk free.
2. Have not done any benchmarks but I assume their servers and caching system is solid. I have actually used some latency and page loads tests on their main site before signing up and their site was faster then many others to I figured the sites they host may be like this maybe even on the the systems.
3. Automatic backups for all this environments (I personally only have setup live but still something positive to have)
1. Their system is VERY specialized and you can not expect plugins to work, more on that later.
2. Get this: Their $25 per month lowest plan claims to have 256MB of application memory. But guess what your WordPress install has available – 40MB! I actually found out about this because a plugin told it to me. I was actually able to set the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT or what the wp-config define value is called to 256 MB BUT: This is a so claimed high performance premium WordPress host that is in this business for years. I call this either purpose or just lack of paying any attention, this should be set automatically for you when you setup a site, like all the other wp-config values with environment variables. So it could upgrade automatically for you if you upgrade your plan. But my install had 40 MB! I would not call that managed hosting.
3. The learning curve is quite a lot of you first get confronted with their specialized git staging system. It would be very well worth it to learn if everything else would be fine but its not. And it not ends with the git staging or their “terminus” their wp-config, upload folders … you name it its all different then elsewhere. For example they have their own config for restricting folder access and things like that you have to learn.
4. Their specialized system is very in-transparent and its proprietary and thats also what concerns me as a open source enthusiast. You learn their system but if you move to another host you cant reuse what you have learned, you can not study what goes on in their system exactly.
5. I found out by trial and error that you actually can open a support ticket when you want but you have to contact the support chat first and basically beg for them to open a ticket for you. That can be extremely annoying. Its nice to have a chat and they actually respond within minutes. My experience is about 8+ minutes and its seems that it was ofter longer then the average they display. So the chat in its own is a nice little feature to have, you can ask them simple questions, they may point you to FAQ and doc entries thats all fine but that chat window is extremely small and amplifies this annoying feeling of being restricted. I think its more higher ranked technicians who handle the support tickets. The chat support is supposed to determine what is worth a ticket I guess. But the issue is if you KNOW you don’t want to have this tiny little annoying chat window where you can barely type your issue in, when you know your problem is supposed to be a ticket that may take some time some back and forth, something not for a chat. You have to ask them first so you open a chat wait 5-20 minutes is what I got I think. And then they ask you a question and they their response time is again many minutes. They do not stay with you so to speak, they probably chat with many people at the same time. If all you want is for them to open a ticket for you its quite annoying to have this back and forth multiple times for no reason whatsoever. They artificially restrict support tickets so only the $100 plans can open them themselves. But the support lead told me “we always open tickets for you, just ask”. That makes no sense to me, probably not even for them! Because its wastes time of chat support persons. Now to be fair their chat is not as temporary as I first thought, the sessions are actually saved and you can resume and things get emailed to you. Still annoying for anything that exceeds a simple question.
Now to make things clear I do sometimes take multiple days to respond to my customers but they can open a ticket and write as much as they want and be done with it and move on in their day and come back later. I cant to that on pantheon. I would trade that chat in for real tickets any day even if response times are slow.
6. And lastly my experience with the support, dodging dodging dodging.
I had a problem with easy digital downloads. And and tried getting help from them, they first ask me to provide them with steps to reproduce, I did quite resistively provided them with a perfect debugging env to then after all of that get a their support policy “we do not touch your code” quoted. I tried to fight for my support, narrowing it down making it more easy for them to debug. They repeatedly refused support. I argued that I do not care if they touch my code, with on itself is a intentionally vague phrased policy because everything is your code. Your entire site is your code, even your wp-config is your code and they actually cloned by site and tested around and helped me figured out another issue before by actually touching my code so to speak. They cloned my site into a multidev env, that is also a feature is also restricted for the higher plans only. I guess I am supposed to be grateful because basically everything they do it actually something they do not need to do if you think of it from that angle. So they covered themselves already with they policy, so you see there is a intention not to help there. I do get that they do not want to help people with code issues in random code they use but my case was very special.
Anyway I fought and they spend quite some time arguing with me quoting their policy again and again instead of actually listening to me, giving me maybe hints to their NGINX config, symlinking or anything why the downloads failed. So they essentially let you lose on their highly specialized system but if you have any issues they will not help you even if related to that very system. Here a direct quote:
“This might turn out to be one of those plugins that just doesn’t work well on the platform. You’ll need to continue debugging. Let us know if you’re able to get to the root cause and if there is a work around we’ll happily add that to our problematic plugins page.” So this so called premium WP managed hoster is actually not interested in helping you in any way when it comes to their in-transparent system. You don’t even know what NGINX configs they use … they just let you stand in the rain. And you have to pay 25$ for that! I asked them to contact EDD support to help them with questions about NGINX configs, they never contacted them! Not gave me any hint about any unusual NGINX config they may have in place.
Oh I forget to tell you that I actually already needed a special plugin to make PHP sessions work in their system. I mean no big deal but it at the same time something that is not native and may be error prone …
And it turned out I was right, the EDD support debugged hours on my site and through trail and error, without knowing the NGINX config their found the issue. And now I am supposed to present pantheon with the solution they did not help in any, even so small way. Literally not one hint. For a so called specialized WP host I think this is absolutely unacceptable! If you take this much money, have a that much specialized system you are supposed to actually help when issues arise instead of just refusing to help.
7. Price is to high. In no way is this service worth $25 a month! If I would know all this before I would have staying on my VPS and invested the time to manually roll a open source staging system.
I feel very uncomfortable now because other plugins I may need may also fail in the future.
That their support policy basically says: We well not help you with anything. And the support refuses to help you.
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Ben McClure
Pantheon does Drupal and WordPress hosting extremely well–they are arguably the best at it. Their platform is very flexible and powerful, and their team is knowledgeable and friendly. Their git-based development workflow and simple multi-dev environments make testing changes and keeping multiple developers working on something simultaneously a cinch. THeir new global CDN means free CDN and SSL service for all customers!
Hosting of things other than Drupal and WordPress is not necessarily well supported (if at all). Sites built on a number of separate components using separate MySQL databases or application directories would not do well on Pantheon–or at least, would require you to sign up for several plans at once.
Ultimately I wish I had known what Pantheon could offer us sooner, to avoid all of the headaches we went through at other hosting providers before Pantheon.
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Nicholas De Salvo
The workflow from test to production for Drupal projects is pretty amazing. The service handles easily what would otherwise be a laborious manual process. It’s nice to be able to easily work on changes in a development environment and then press a button to make it live.
The support and documentation are a little lackluster at first. Once you understand the workflow, things are great, but I had to make several support requests before I was able to fully understand the setup.
Getting setup was not a simple process, and the documentation was a little lackluster. But once everything is completely setup, the experience is pretty amazing.
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Jonathan Ganucheau
Takes the complication out of setting up and maintaining a dev environment for WordPress and Drupal sites. Out of the box, you get dev, staging, and production all controlled by git. With WordPress this is big deal if you’ve ever tried to do this yourself.
Because so many things are handled out of the box and Pantheon is a true PaaS model, there is not much flexibility for architecting – which is to be expected. However, some features they’ve recently added messed up our DNS, CDN, and SSL security architecture. This is because they added a “Free HTTPS” and global CDN solution of their own. The problem was that also meant they really weren’t going to let you use your own SSL or CDN setup. Our site went down a couple times and had to get on the phone with support. As of today it’s kind of hacked just to allow us to still run our own SSL, but we lost the ability of having a CDN period because of this new “free” feature.
I wish I would have known they were going to change things like they did with the CDN and SSL setup. I know they’re in business to make money, but they could at least keep the same level of customization capability and not change that on legacy customers, too.
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Lee Edward Quessenberry
Expedited launches, code version control, development workflow, and speed of services are the very big assets that come to mind when you think about Pantheon. I absolutely love their love for developers. Making a version controlled Drupal or WordPress project is absolutely simple and very robust in terms of detail, features, reliability, and speed. You want to work with Pantheon.
Ticket response times can be lengthy at times. Flexibility to do certain things with your cloud that fall outside of their preferred structure is very rigid. It’s a sandbox during development, but that sandbox allows no sand to spill over the sides. It’s not a bad thing, it just doesn’t allow for the SysAdmin type of person to tweak things.
This is tough to say, but the cost difference between personal and business plans was a bit steep. If I had known that, I probably would have stayed with Pantheon, but I would want to really have the differences explained to me. In hindsight, the personal plan is more than enough for most website businesses.
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