GreenGeeks vs. Pantheon

If you are looking for a shared hosting service, Green Geeks pricing is comparable to most vendors. T2 tech support is generally knowledgeable, T1 is responsive via chat, but often is not able to resolve issues (other than KB questions). Load balancing on a shared server is difficult for all vendors, since individual website usage is hard to predict. Vendors have different ways of dealing with this - some simply do not guarantee resource limits (e.g. available memory, PHP threads, etc). Green Geeks does provide resource limits as part of their contracts, but they frequently downgrade those limits, presumably to address overloaded servers. BUT BE AWARE - I believe GreenGeeks uses unethical practices when a customer wants to cancel. It is my personal experience that they make it extremely difficult / impossible to cancel a contract. I feel the process is not transparent and they will ignore emails directing them to cancel. In my experience, they will then proceed to charge customers for a renewed contract. I believe multiple customers have reported this problem.

Pantheon is excellent for medium-large websites that require high availability and a managed workflow. It would be inappropriate for small websites because of the cost or for situations where more control of the environment is appropriate. We find it useful because we rarely do anything outside of the Drupal application.

Incentivized

• T1 support generally responds w/i 15-30 minutes

• Effective use of our codebase deployment and implementation.
• The dashboard functionality and general stability and security are excellent.
• The server is quite consistent, and if you need assistance from the support team, they are very quick to respond.
• Automatic updates let me ensure that my customers have safe websites without increasing my own expense.
• The team offers excellent assistance and help for chat.

Incentivized

• In my personal experience, the billing department uses unethical practices when customers cancel subs.

• 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)

Incentivized

The environment is stable and we have not had any issues/downtime. The annual cost is reasonable.

Incentivized

Pantheon is an easy system, especially to the users with previous experience with other similar platform and the interface is clear enough to easily understand how things operates. On the Cloud deployment everything also works effectively and the technical team from Pantheon community are very helpful on providing the necessary assistant to their customers.

Incentivized

Even tier 1 Pantheon chat and ticket support are knowledgeable, competent, and useful. They routinely understand and promptly resolve urgent, complex, and/or unusual issues that other hosts need to escalate to tier 2 or tier 3 support personnel. I honestly can't think of a truly negative or disappointing support experience in the years I've used Pantheon hosting for client websites.

Incentivized

Once the environments were up and running, the implementation was easy to synchronize with latest data prior to switchover.

Incentivized

From a technical perspective, all shared server vendors are comparable. Bluehost has terrible customer support. A2 is more expensive, but has more personalized support.

Although it may seem a good fit for a company that needs extra control over the deployment process and development process, for a firm that is mainly concentrating on SEO, it would be an overkill. Pantheon provides that sweet automation that allows us to shed some weight on development and focus on our business activities.

Incentivized

• Throttling servers impacted website availability.

• Pantheon allows ordinary sites to excel esp if there is consistent development going on behind the scenes.
• Website management is super easy and the hosting fee gets paid off as you save on developer hours.
• Expensive for those who are not consistently developing on the platform, there are other options out there at better price points.

Incentivized