Pantheon is worth the price. If you can afford it.
September 21, 2021

Pantheon is worth the price. If you can afford it.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pantheon

As a web design and development agency, we are a Pantheon partner. They host our own company website as well as dozens of client websites. While Pantheon does not host all of our client websites, they generally host our highest traffic and highest complexity sites.
  • Performance
  • Stability
  • Maintainability
  • Enforced best practices
  • Cost
  • Enforced best practices add maintenance complexity
  • Overkill for smaller, lower traffic sites
  • Ran a non-profit campaign website receiving 500,000 to 1,000,000 hits daily with superb performance and no downtime.
  • Runs a TV show non-profit website that regularly sees spikes of 40-60k visitors within a few minutes after the credits roll, again with superb performance and no downtime.
  • The only time our own website went down was due to a massive cloud infrastructure outage impacting significant portions of the internet.
Pantheon provides stellar premium hosting for Drupal and WordPress. The platform is highly performant. Support is responsive and knowledgeable. System-enforced best practices improve site stability alongside rock-solid platform reliability. However, Pantheon absolutely charges for every positive feature and is a poster child for "you get what you pay for."

Do you think Pantheon delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Pantheon's feature set?

Yes

Did Pantheon live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Pantheon go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Pantheon again?

Yes

Hosting is one area where the budget should be "as much as we can afford" rather than "the least we can pay." Pantheon provides superb, rock-solid, highly performant hosting. However, the old "Good, Fast, or Cheap: Pick one and if you're very lucky pick two" adage applies. Pantheon is very good. Pantheon is very fast. Pantheon is not cheap. If the web hosting budget can stretch to support Pantheon, I recommend it without reservation. Unfortunately for many of our agency clients, the hosting budget simply cannot handle Pantheon's fees.

Pantheon Support

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.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No, we did not purchase premium support. Since an overhaul of Pantheon's agency partner model a few years ago, my company does receive priority support. However, even before that overhaul, standard Pantheon support was honestly just as stellar.
Yes - Last year we noted a defect in how a live site's domain change propagated through the Pantheon caching & CDN network. Different CDN edges cached different primary domain states, causing significant instability due to sporadic and unpredictable redirection loops. Even if a page loaded successfully, referenced styles, scripts, and images could fail. Once we identified the likely issue and contacted Pantheon support, they promptly verified the situation using internal tools. They were then able to reset & reload the full site throughout the entire CDN network. This fully resolved the issue. Months later, during our next live site domain change, the issue had been fixed and did not recur.