Pantheon Managed Hosting

Pantheon Managed Hosting Review 2017

In this review, we’ll take a look at the managed WordPress hosting and platform management offered by Pantheon. While Pantheon markets itself as a host for both WordPress and Drupal, we will focus almost exclusively on the WordPress side of their hosting.

Founded in 2010, Pantheon offers a complete “Website Management Platform
for Drupal & WordPress”. By utilizing cloud hosting, they offer flexible, elastic web hosting that can quickly scale as needed.

First, we’ll take you through the features you get when you host with Pantheon and then we’ll give you a look at our real-world testing data so you can judge Pantheon’s performance for yourself.

Overview of Pantheon Hosting Features

Here’s everything you can expect when you host your site with Pantheon:

• Container based hosting (Docker even hosts their site on Pantheon!)
• Easy scalability to handle any traffic spikes
• DDoS and intrusion protection
• 24/7/365 expert support
• Cloud-based development tools
• Built-in caching
• Automatic backups
• Automatic updates for WordPress and Drupal
• GIT, SSH, and more

On paper, it looks great. But how about real-world performance? That’s what really matters. Let’s dig in and look at how a site hosted on Pantheon performs.

Pantheon Hosting Performance – Real Testing Data

To examine Pantheon’s performance, we set up a test site and looked at three key metrics:

• Time to First Byte – a good measure of how quickly a web server responds to requests.
• Average page load time – how long, on average, it took our test site to fully load.
• Uptime – how much, if any, downtime our test site experienced during the test period.

Here’s how Pantheon did in our tests:

For Time to First Byte, they clocked in at 0.47 seconds, which is right about in the middle of all hosts that we tested. To give a comparison, Flywheel and MediaTemple, both similarly priced hosting options, came in at 0.39 seconds and 0.45 seconds, respectively. So Pantheon is right in line with what we’d expect.

Pantheon offered better performance in our average page load time test. Our test site loaded in an average of 1.74 seconds, which was one of the fastest times of any of the hosts that we tested. Again, Pantheon performed at about the same level as Flywheel. But this time they blew MediaTemple out of the water.

Finally, Pantheon offered excellent uptime. Our test site was up 99.99% of the time, which is about as good as you can expect.

Overall, Pantheon impressed in our tests. Our test site loaded quickly and had excellent uptime. We can’t ask for much more.

Pantheon Hosting Data Center Locations

Your data center is the actual physical location where your site is hosted. It’s an important consideration because you want it to be as near as possible to your target readers in order to maximize your site’s performance.

Pantheon’s data centers are managed by Rackspace and located entirely within the United States (though they have plans to eventually expand to Europe).

While this is fine for those targeting a primarily North American audience, anyone targeting Europe or Asia may want to consider hosting elsewhere.

Pantheon Hosting Takes it to the Cloud

One thing differentiating Pantheon hosting from many of the other hosts that we looked at is its cloud technology. Instead of paying for specific space on a server, you only pay for the actual resources and features that you need.

That means you don’t need to worry about specific CPU or RAM limits because your site is distributed across the entire platform.

Pantheon’s cloud technology also supports PHP 7 and HTTP 2 for improved performance.

Pantheon Support and Knowledge Base

For their cheaper plans, Pantheon offers 24/7 chat support. Higher priced plans also gain access to 24/7 phone support. If you prefer phone support, you may want to keep this distinction in mind when considering Pantheon.

Pantheon also offers a helpful knowledge base with over 200 well-written articles if you prefer to figure things out for yourself.

Pantheon Plans and Pricing

One of the unique things about Pantheon is that you only pay when your site goes live. That means you can set up a development environment and test out Pantheon for free. This is definitely a nice perk and enables you to get a feel for the environment before forking over your credit card.

Once you decide to push a site live, here’s what you can expect to pay:

Their Personal plan costs $25 per site per month and supports up to 10,000 monthly pageviews.

The Professional plan costs $100 per site per month and supports up to 100,000 monthly pageviews. It also adds a Redis object cache.

Finally, their Business plan costs a whopping $400 per site per month and supports up to 500,000 monthly pageviews and adds full-stack support.

They also offer custom plans for organizations that need even more power.

We love how transparent Pantheon’s pricing is. It’s easy to understand exactly what you’re getting with each plan.

Should You Choose Pantheon Hosting?

We liked what we saw with Pantheon hosting. It’s a new breed of cloud-based hosting that offers many advantages over traditional hosting. Our real-world testing data backed this up. Pantheon’s page load times and uptime were both excellent, especially for the price.

Speaking of price, we feel like $25 is a reasonable amount for even mid-sized WordPress sites. If you’re considering the higher-priced plans, you may want to give a look at Kinsta or Liquid Web hosting as well, as both of those hosts offer excellent performance around the ~$100 price point.

Overall, we definitely recommend you consider Pantheon. As we mentioned, it’s free to set up a test site. So, head over to Pantheon and give their interface a try. We promise you’ll like what you see!