Pantheon is a web hosting provider specifically made for WordPress and Drupal sites. It provides professional developers with tools needed for high performing sites, including staging environments, version control, backups, and workflows. In this review, we covered user reviews and pricing. Ready to try Pantheon? Get a free trial.
What Pantheon Does Well
Users who gave Pantheon a positive review said that the system simplifies the process of setting up and maintaining a development environment for WordPress and Drupal sites. They also commended the platform’s security updates and speed of services.
“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 a cinch. They also provide free CDN and SSL service for all customers.”
— Ben McClure
What Pantheon Does Not Do Well
Users who gave Pantheon a negative review complained about the limited flexibility of the software when it comes to customizations. They also cautioned about the steep learning curve and high pricing.
“Flexibility to do certain things with your cloud that fall outside their preferred structure is very rigid. It’s a sandbox (a safe and isolated environment for testing) during development, but it allows no sand to spill over the sides. It’s not a bad thing, it just doesn’t allow for the system administrator type of person to tweak things.”
— Lee Edward Quessenberry
Pantheon Pricing
Pantheon offers three types of hosting subscriptions: Basic ($50/month), Performance (ranging from $175-$1,000/month), and Elite (custom prized). The main differences between the plans include the maximum number of domains, monthly visits, pages served, disk storage space, and more.
($/Month) | of Domains | |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | ||
| Performance | ||
| Small | ||
| Medium | ||
| Large | ||
| Extra Large | ||
| Elite |
Ready to try out Pantheon? Get a free trial.
Top Pick from Fit Small Business
Bluehost vs. GoDaddy: Comparison of Price, Features & Server Performance — When it comes to deciding between GoDaddy vs. Bluehost, the differences can be subtle. Both offer a very similar array of services, and their server performance ratings are roughly the same. Learn more about these two web hosting providers in this guide.
Pantheon Features
Check out the list below of some of Pantheon’s features:
SEE FEATURES
Pantheon FAQ
Does Pantheon offer special plans for educational institutions?
READ ANSWER
Will Pantheon help users with the onboarding of their sites to the platform?
READ ANSWER
Popular Integrations
Here is a list of some of Pantheon’s popular integrations:
VIEW INTEGRATIONS
Pantheon Alternatives
Not sure if Pantheon is the right fit for you? Read our reviews of all top web hosting providers or check out one of these three Pantheon competitors.
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Matthew Cannon
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Provides a corporate level hosting environment with dev tools that make launching a site a breeze. Most importantly, it’s all available at a more consumer level cost. With a DEV, STAGE and PROD environment and a UI that seamlessly allows a user to jump between environments, you never feel like time is being wasted. The most important feature, one which keeps my clients happy, is the automation of keeping the CMS up to date with security patches. My one client is on Drupal when a bunch of high alert security patches were released. Without doing anything, Pantheon patched it all and the client never experienced any outages. That was great for the client and for myself.
Even though I already mentioned that the cost is on par with consumers, it’s still high for some whom have no experience with what it takes to keep a site up and running. Services like GoDaddy farther cloud the market with cheaper cost and inferior products making consumers think hosting services should be really cheap. Pantheon is a great tool, but maybe deals can be developed to aim at getting consumers who might not know that there are better ways to manage their sites.
Really, nothing. The fact that Pantheon lets you create a DEV and STAGE environment to try out their platform without any upfront costs allows you to learn everything before deciding that it’s right for you. If it is, only then are you asked to pay for their service in order to publish the PROD environment.
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Joshua Harbor, CSM, MBA
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Pantheon does a great job of making developing, launching, and managing sites built with WordPress and Drupal. Their plans include 3 environments (DEV,TEST,LIVE) to promote best practices in your development team. Their support team is knowledgeable for any snags you might run into during your deployments and setup of DNS. Additionally they regularly have webinars/learning events to keep up with the latest updates to WordPress and Drupal, so you always know the newest trends.
It’s hard to think of something they don’t do well, they have a great service and their team is consistently helpful. Aside from occasionally longer than 5minute wait times on chat, there really isn’t anything I can suggest for them to improve. If you are looking for high level of control on your server or database, this probably isn’t the service for you.
I wish I would have known how much easier they make managing WordPress or Drupal projects compared to using other providers that give you more control over your setup. I’ve used bargain hosting plans and industry standard hosts as well, but for managing a WordPress or Drupal site, you really can’t get a better partner than Pantheon.
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Rob Watson
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Pantheon has really upped the ante on how hosting should be done. They essentially built a next-generation WordPress and Drupal hosting platform from the ground up, with security, performance, and an optimized and predictable DevOps workflow as the primary consideration rather than as an afterthought. It’s NOT a typical cPanel or Plesk host, which really revolutionizes the way we think of hosting.
Pantheon doesn’t do anything with email or domain registration. In many ways, that’s a good thing because they’re hyper-focused on providing the fastest and most secure hosting on the planet. On the other hand, it leaves me explaining to customers why they have to stay with GoDaddy or other registrars/hosting providers for email and domains. Even though Pantheon competes well on price once you tally all the “upsells” other hosting providers force onto unsuspecting subscribers, for some clients, Pantheon can be a non-starter because they just one one bill to pay to one provider for all of it. If Pantheon can figure out a way to provide email and domain registration without compromising its core hosting or pricing, my conversations with clients will go much easier. Also, it would be great to see them offer the ability to use 3rd party SSL certs. Right now they offer a super-easy LetsEncrypt SSL that provisions automatically without any need for me to mess with command line provisioning, and it auto-renews. But some clients have invested sometimes thousands of dollars over a long term in the “brand name” certs like Digicert (formerly Norton) because the ability to display the trust marks of such companies has been proven to lead to better customer conversions. Customers don’t understand that LetsEncrypt and Digicert and any other SSL are equal, cryptographically speaking, so it’s a hard sell to show a “LetsEncrypt” seal and expect the same level of trust. A third thing I’d like to see Pantheon do, which I’m told is being developed, is to combine the strengths of Kalabox and Lando into a GUI-based interface (like Kalabox, but better-performing) so that outside developers I need to briefly bring in on a Multidev project can get up and running in minutes rather than having to spend a lot of time in the Pantheon DevOps documentation. They’d still have the CLI strengths of Lando if they need it, but the relative productivity of a GUI when they just need to quick see and manage everything graphically.
Even though I discovered Pantheon early in its genesis, I wish I had known about it even sooner! I had used and been a reseller of multiple other hosting companies, but they can’t hold a candle to Pantheon.
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Wolf (Timothy) Bishop
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The Pantheon workflow and staging tools are the best I have seen. I LOVE that I can stage sites at no cost and only pay when I am ready to make them live.
Well, I have no real complaints. But if I had to knitpick, the Git integration could be a little easier.
Well, nothing really.
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Nicolas Jonas
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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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