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An ideal platform for WordPress & Drupal websites with continous growth
December 13, 2021

An ideal platform for WordPress & Drupal websites with continous growth

Quratulain Habib, PMP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pantheon

Pantheon is our no. 1 recommendation for serious WordPress hosting. Since we only work on WordPress, we have over the years tested, used, and moved on from many platforms. Unlike most hosting providers that give better resources for bigger plans, Pantheon maintains a high standard across all its plans. It is a platform as a service with Dev - Test - Live workflow that ensures each environment is not just user friendly but extremely developer-friendly as well. For most organizations running publicly accessible websites, these are extremely important points. How do you improve the website without upsetting the marketing department or the teams managing the content? Pantheon is your answer to both.
  • Website code management.
  • Workflows for site management.
  • Hosting infrastructure.
  • Pricing w.r.t. sites that have more users than corresponding page views.
  • Live Sites going idle in 24 hours instead of 72 for instance.
  • 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.
I have hosted my WordPress sites in a lot of places. From private cloud servers to shared spaces. There is almost always a nasty surprise regardless of how good the hosting company claims their security to be. The same is the case where website performance is key. They almost always disappoint after a few months - if not immediately. With Pantheon, you can keep your eyes closed where security is concerned and not worry about performance either. Unless you hand over the website admin password to someone for your live website and do not keep an eye on their activities on the site, there is no way for your site content to change. Malicious scripts do not get installed (even if you hand over the admin password) and neither can anyone, over-write / edit your core files on the live site. Pantheon separates code modification from the DB and files (images, video, etc) and code can only be modified on the 'dev' environment - which is not accessible via search engines. In all, sites are safe and secure from mistakes too.
Developers can easily develop, while marketing and content teams can test out their ideas in a safe environment called 'test' which is different from the 'live' that your customers see. Developers can quickly cut through the backlog and multiple 'dev' teams can work simultaneously thanks to multi-Dev, a facility through which multiple development streams can be incorporated together to check the changes.
A lot of the other providers on this list are different from each other with very different target audiences. The only thing Pantheon can compare with is managed WordPress hosting, WordPress-related support, and hosting on Google Compute Engine. Pantheon wins hands down in DevOps. The amount of website management that can be done by non-developers via the platform alone is unbelievable and no other managed hosting comes close to it.

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

There are too many instances where Pantheon is truly the best. The biggest being their website management software which remains the best of many that I have tested. Their hosting infrastructure is also world-class backed by an awesome team of engineers and professionals. For high-traffic sites and sites where there is constant development and upgrades going on behind the scenes, Pantheon is the only choice in my opinion. There are however 2 instances where I find, Pantheon to not be a choice. Ever since Pantheon changed its pricing structure to calculate based on monthly users than say daily users, it is no longer cost-effective for sites that rely on organic search traffic for their views rather than website visitors who are there to browse through various articles on the site. Pantheon now calculates on average monthly visitors (unique IP every 24 hours = 1 user) and monthly page views. Pageview thresholds are 5x of the visitors which doesn't work out if your users are only browsing 2 pages on average with each visit. For eCommerce sites, this is a huge win, not for sites that address specific users' needs only. It is also not great for budding businesses who need an awesome platform to create a great first impression on users yet may not have visitors every day. The live sites power down into an idle state if there is no hit every 24 hours. No client wants their customers to see Zeus instead of their homepage. It would be better if their hit counter was over a period of 72 hours instead of 24.