Pantheon Reviews

The pantheon DEV to TEST to PROD workflow

Technical customer service at times can be challenging to deal with - but I do not personally have any elite plans on my account (customers of mine do). Elite customer service is fantastic.

Don't hesitate, do it.

Pantheon provides the best hosting platform for Drupal I know of. It solves ALL of the concerns I have about managing servers and handling infrastructure. Before I knew of pantheon I lost sleep over the fear of server downtime and the work involved to protect and prepare for that eventuality.

Pantheon solved this. By providing a viable, robust and reliable managed hosting platform with a powerful developer focused deployment workflow I'm able to build sites faster, safer and with more flexibility then ever before.

Bottom line, I do not worry about the server side of the project any more. ever.

Pantheon's automation is the best. Pantheon's dashboards and the isolation between dev, test, and production environments let us stage changes for public, client review. Then, once the client approves the changes, it's only one click to deploy. It's also one-click for most Drupal core upgrades.

Pantheon is also high performance -- they somehow handle varnish caching automatically without getting in my way.

It's not immediately apparent how to handle site scalability. If we have larger sites, it's not clear if we can add more resources, more servers, etc. Sometimes we have server issues arise that require intervention from Pantheon support, and their support staff can take a few hours to respond.

Try them out for free; launch a heavy installation profile like Open Atrium, and see how it performs. Have your team try out the deployment workflow and see if it's a natural fit for your process.

If you build sites for clients, sign-up to be a reseller so you can host more sites for free than the basic free level.

Pantheon's process fits right into our existing installation-profile-based continuous integration process. We build large, business-logic-heavy Drupal sites, and the the Pantheon hosting system is the first system we've used that fully supports our version-control-driven deployment process. Internally, we use a continuous integration server that uses Drupal Installation Profiles, Drush, GIT, and Aegir to build an entire site from scratch and then deploy it. Pantheon's GIT-based deployments fit perfectly with this approach.

The automatic backups also allow us to slide back to previous releases of sites, if things go badly.

Love the DevOps pipeline automation between WordPress clients. Saves me time, money and resources.

Cost can be more than needed if only a simple site solution is required (no custom development).

If you have WordPress/Drupal sites that require a lot of custom development than this is the platform for you, the ease of use for pushing changes up the pipeline from Dev to Testing to Production is magical and allows for solid development practices even with a live production environment.

Can be a bit overkill if you only need a simple, straightforward WordPress install and theme.

Managing several WordPress websites between different levels of development while letting Business users continue content creation on a production version has been the largest immediate benefit of utilizing the platform! Also the ability to spin up free development instances and only get charged when going live is one of the most amazing features to date. It puts other hosting companies to shame.

I like that there are 3 environments for every site: Dev, Test, and Live. At first, the interstitial step (Test) may seem superfluous. Anyone who has worked with WordPress, however, understands that it's tricky to edit code while the client enters content. Pantheon makes the process a little less painful. It's also great that one can bill the client directly from the Pantheon portal. Less financial worry & fuss.

The system is locked down for (I assume) security reasons. I would prefer to have unfettered ssh access to my servers. This feels like a small inconvenience for how well the service works with client work.

Use Pantheon for easy web hosting and release management.

Currently we are using Pantheon for web hosting, so we don't have a lot of need for other apps. I see, however, that Node.js is installed on the server. I am interested in learning what it can do.

Pantheon really excels at performance. I honestly don't know how they get WordPress sites to operate as fast as they do. It's incredible.

-You really don't need a dev environment in their cloud. More ideally, it would just be dev locally, staging/prod in the cloud.

-Very rigid. You have to play by their roles. SSO, cookies, 3rd party tools can be tough to get working in their environment.

-Would love to see more options other than WordPress and Drupal. Support for headless architectures is lacking as well.

-Curious to see how the experiments with CircleCI pay off - continuous integration would be a nice feature that is lacking currently.

Do you homework if you have a very custom setup - it can be complicated to get legacy systems to play nice with Pantheon. I've had to bail on a couple of Pantheon installs because their cookie system is so rigid.

-Biggest win from pantheon is the developer experience. It's just so much easier to get going with their platform than anyone else.

-I love using Lando locally in conjunction with Pantheon. It makes moving the DB around so easy.

-Git based deployments that work out of the box is also a huge win.

Pantheon has a ton of great features, but the improvements to workflow like the multi dev environments is the one that I see the most benefit from. Between the multidev environments and the ease of controlling where you are at in the development process through the built-in dev test live environments and the ease of moving code and content between them, my team has made massive improvements to our workflow. Pantheons documentation, support, and developer tools are great too. Pantheon is truly dedicated to the WordPress community, they do weekly webinars, build developer tools to improve the lives of the developers using their platform, and are active members of the wordpress community.

Pantheon is also a great platform if you are looking to automate your deployment process, they provide plenty of how-to's, tutorials, and tools to get you going in this directions too.

All in all pantheon is hands down my favorite wordpress hosting provider, i cant see hosting a wordpress site anywhere else.

If i was forced to come up with a something that i was less happy with, it would probably have to be that multi site is not supported in their normal plans.

I highly recommend using pantheon, the improvements that you will see to your workflow are worth any additional cost you may see.

We have solved a few problems with pantheon but mostly just having a more reliable host with a solid workflow.

I really appreciate the tools for easy setup and management of a multi-environment website. Git integration puts a lot of power and control in my hands and also helps keep developers using a modern professional workflow for building sites, getting them approved, and deploying them safely and reliably.

It took our team a little while to get accustomed to the very specific workflows that are required to use the platform correctly/effectively.

The multi-dev abilities are powerful but the branch/name length maximum (11 characters) is limiting.

The lack of a GUI (vs CLI only) for setting your site url and display name. And inability to rename either of them once it has been created.

Give it a try. Lean into the multi-environment workflow and Git deployment.

Restricted workflow creates a better experience for the team and the client. Moving many sites to the platform increases team efficiency and confidence in deployment and quality of the hosting. CDN and HTTPS implementation has practically no configuration necessary.

My favorite two things about Pantheon are the three environments (dev, test and live) to allow a flexible workflow based on client and the integration with git changes. Sales team we worked with was very nice and helped us come up with a good solution for our company. I also felt like they really listened to what we needed versus just telling us what they thought we needed.

That the process of going live doesn't include a change to the database automatically to switch out the live-domain.pantheon.io URLs to the new domain.com URLs. We have had some issues with the database just continuing to have the Pantheon reference in there for half the URLs because we forget to do a database find and replace.

When comparing this vs. other systems, Pantheon gives much better flexibility having three environments versus two. I also like that pushing from one environment to another needs to happen in Pantheon vs. in WordPress so that people who are admins don't necessarily have the ability to push changes live.

Changes tracking, dev and live environment, good way of pulling in new WordPress versions as they become available, good up-time, friendly service. It gives us a good way to keep track of all our WordPress sites and make sure they are being managed well.

At first glance and activation, pantheon was a rather intimidating platform; It seemed to offer way more than you likely needed to do. However after spending more than a month, managing various client websites, as well as my own companies properties. Major points for easy deployments!

I feel like some of the interface has fragmented design aspects, where finding certain configuration settings seems to be rather difficult depending on what page you're on.

So the great thing with pantheon is that it lacks a project size bias. Whether you have a small personal project, or you're managing several client domains, Pantheon has a really clean way of organizing this for you. In addition to Pantheons management dashboard, the depth of the settings you can customize your workflow to meet is seemingly endless. Some projects i worked on had specific needs in order to run. Heck, I even spun up a development branch to our marketing site for testing before deployment. It's hard to pass up a service that does virtually everything you may need it to do, but should your needs require any of the above, i believe pantheon is that right choice for you.

The first and largest problem pantheon solves is domain/host management, and deployments. Prior to pantheon, deployments were a very fragile process, and the platform that was being used had terrible source control. Pantheon definitely made project managing a lot easier.

The biggest selling point for Pantheon are the tools they offer us. As a development agency, we have built-in workflows through Pantheon that I don't know if we could live without at this point. We have taken full advantage of the multi-dev and terminus features especially.

There isn't much to dislike. It seems like the dashboard has a bit more slowness and issues than we would like, but it is usually resolved somewhat quickly. If there are git/workflow issues they will always happen when we are deploying something.

One of the easiest hosts to get started on if you are using WordPress or Drupal. The workflows they provide are best in the industry and the tools will help you are your developers be much more productive. We've been using them for years and can attest to this.

We have been able to use Pantheon as our preferred platform for all of our Drupal projects. We have built our own local environments to match the architecture that Pantheon uses, because it is just a great way to do things. We have been able to manage clients with a dozen sites with the custom upstream and I don't think we would have been able to do anything remotely similar on any other host.

I love how you don't have to pay for development. I typically have clients that sit in testing for some time for content. I love the three different type of environments, we can redevelop a site without it affecting the live status of the site. This is really great for some of our big clients with a lot of traffic. Additionally, If I have a question about wordpress or drupal, I can contact them and they are happy to give me guidance.

I wish that other programs can be installed besides Wordpress and Drupal. I have other clients that use other CMS like Joomla. It would be nice to just use them for hosting for all of my clients. Is there a plan like this in the future?

Pantheon is 100% there for you, they have all type of support. Their webinar are awesome. Every hosting company I have been with never did any.

I have realized development is easy with my clients. It's a easy click install and some customers just stay with Pantheon which is nice. I love how you can invite the client to pay instead of me paying for them.

I love how I can maintain three default environments so easily via control panel. Database, files and content can flow easily between them without manual export/import. I also love how easy it is to spin up a local environment with tools like Lando and Docker.

One of my only real concerns about Pantheon is its lack of post-deploy builds. So in other words, my frontend workflow includes compiling javascript and sass, which is normally not something you'd commit to the repo. But since Pantheon has no support for post-deploy processes, lots of compiled code has to be committed over and over.

If you need a solid, all-in-one hosting and workflow for Wordpress and Drupal, I highly recommend Pantheon.

As a freelance developer making Wordpress sites, Pantheon saves me so much time in my workflow. Pushing code and content through different environments is super easy and way nicer than doing endless exports and imports by hand. I also love that I can so easily spin up local environments with tools like Lando.

I love that you can create a live testing environment easily. It also had seamless push -live integration once you've made changes to your testing environment. That control feature makes the biggest difference when you're trying to add new functions and/or plugins

Pantheon site caches VERY frequently. Caching to speed up load times is great. But when you're trying to make front-end changes and can't figure out why those changes aren't showing up, having to go back into pantheon dashboard to clear it every 15 min can become bothersome. I also had a weird experience in a theme where clearing site cache would drop custom css additions for a 5-10 min window before adding them back into the site. Not efficient in time crunch, time sensitive editing.

One benefit is pantheon also creates backups. So if you make a change, and realize you don't want to do that change afterall, you can revert back to a previously saved backup.

My biggest benefit is creating the testing/demo site so a client can view development before ever pushing live to a specific domain.

Performance, security, and bigger bang for the development dollar because I don't have to mess around with lots of hosting particulars and moving parts.

Three environments (dev, test, and live) make development operations a breeze.

Not that this is easy, but I wish there were a better way to ensure that database-level content could be versioned. I'm aware of recommended workarounds but something that more naturally fits the workflow would be awesome.

Be sure you read as much of the documentation as you can. You don't actually need to do this because the user interface is very intuitive. However, by reading the documentation you'll be able to understand the "hidden" advantages that make Pantheon even better.

I'm solving problems for small businesses. In one case, I had just told a client that their site was liable to be compromised with their cut-rate, non-Pantheon host. The client said there was no reason to think so because they had been safe with that host for years. Within a month, the client's site went down because it was broken into by a hacker. We moved them to Pantheon immediately and the site has not had any problems since then.

Pantheon has a friendly support staff, who is consistently able to answer my questions any time I reach out to them. Their easy export of database and image assets makes taking a site live or pulling it down locally super easy. Additionally it helps our team follow a "best practice" process of pushing to dev-to-test-to-live. One feature I use frequently is easily switching from SFTP to GIT mode on the fly. The ability to add files to the dev environment directly through the site, but maintain a commit log means I always know what happened, regardless of how an update was made. I also really enjoy the workflow and ease of setting up domains/https on the sites, the guide for setting up my dns to point to a new site is easy to follow and intuitve. Additionally having caching options and service tiers makes it easy to get the "right" fit for clients of different sizes, regardless of the complexity of their site. Overall, I prefer using Pantheon to other "self managed" hosting options because they do the heavy lifting and thinking for you. They also offer great webinars and thought-leadership on topics like e-commerce, scalability, and how to manage large client projects that help you grow your business.

Sometimes feels restrictive in terms of "following the Pantheon way", but the stability and consistency is what makes the platform so stable

If you're tired of trying to "figure it out yourself" for WordPres

More uptime, better dev workflow

— Ability to have free projects.

— command line tools

— fantastic environment to work in

— streamlined web ui

— almost everything I need as a developer

I remember there were Drupal distributions represented, now they don't seem to be there, like Commerce Kickstart?

Also, I think there should be some basic templates to help people start with both Drupal and/or WordPress.

There could be option for other CMS/plain PHP/node based projects but with same environment and tools?

I found Pantheon more complete and stable than other Drupal solutions. As an old professional, I prefer using command line tools whenever I can and for whatever I need and that is where Pantheon fits perfectly.

Pantheon service is fast, reliable and I never had a doubt or a problem I needed explanation.

I'm with Pantheon since their beginning and although I tried other solutions as well, I still find Pantheon to be superior to others.

I mostly teach students to code but also work on projects. I use Pantheon to help students learn serious development practice like local/stage development and collaboration.

i use Pantheon to develop and stage projects that I work on for my clients, both as end users or other agencies where I am subcontractor.

I also recommend using Pantheon as a tool for development and collaboration when I'm hired as consultant for third parties.

The most important benefits for me are completeness of the platform, its stability and the way they improve it over time.

The ability to use git in a dev, test and live environment makes developing a Drupal site for a client quicker when developing custom modules and themes. Having the ability to use multidev for staging features with each team member saves so much time in setting up environments and performing tests. Combined with using lando to replicate the pantheon environment locally gives our team the resources needed to get projects done efficiently.

There are some issues with getting a Drupal site setup the first time. You need to keep the system in sftp mode until you get the site installed then move over to git to make sure the installer can create the settings file. However this is documented but a pain until you find it. Also renaming sites in the dashboard is not supported. So you have to create a new site, migrate the data and code and remove the old site. So make sure you get the internal name the way you like it first.

You get a bunch of sandbox sites to test out ideas and make sure the site you have can work on pantheon before upgrading.

Managing your own internal dev, test and live servers on AWS or another cloud provider is not trivial. Pantheon makes this process straight forward and gives us the flexibility and transparency our clients need. It has sped up our Drupal development. While there are other Drupal specific hosting providers out there pantheon should be at the top of the list.

The insistence that you follow a dev > stage > prod workflow makes Pantheon a really amazing option for agencies that do client handoff. A lot of client problems with infrastructure get solved by just building on Pantheon and encouraging the client to stay there.

The cost is pretty high for non-enterprise users. If you're a solo dev who wants to host your portfolio site, you're probably going to be priced out.

Similarly, the lack of good external CI/CD integration eventually gets aggravating. It would be really nice to be able to trigger composer/NPM tasks on git hooks. As it stands, you have to do everything the "Pantheon" way. If the client eventually wants to take their site to another hosting provider after dev completion there are some unresolved devops questions that will need to be answered.

Pantheon can be really helpful and simplify your devops pipeline, but beware platform lock in. If you ever move your site to another hosting provider you will certainly have some work to do. That said, Pantheon's internal tools are very well made. Hopefully soon composer workflows will be use by default. Until then, make sure to read up on best practices for composer-based projects.

Devops as a service! When we use Pantheon for everything we really don't have to do much devops at all, and the clients have a solid devops foundation to run on if they take control of a project.

The Pantheon Workflow is easily the best feature. I can start building a clients site with no charge. Once I have it ready, and the client approves it, I can easily launch the site either to my account, or the customers. I love this! And the ability to test changes without fear of breaking the live site is amazing.

The price is a bit more than I would like, but at the same time, it is fair for what you get.

If you work with clients, you need pantheon. Stop paying for hosting sites while in development. Stage them free and when you are ready for a site to go live, switch it to a paid plan to get the best features and support!

I used to be forced to set up complicated server platforms in order to get a true test of a site. But with Pantheons workflow, I can test a site in an identical environment to the live environment. So I know for a fact the site will not break once I push it live.

Pantheon offers best practices, built in to their infrastructure. It is thus easy to help other developers get up to speed using git, 3-stage deployment, https with a custom CDN, etc.

File updates are a bit slower than I would like. I was able to work around that by caching md5 hashes so they didn't have to be recalculated each time files were compared.

If you are already set up using git, automated tools for code deployment, and site and server management, then you might not need pantheon. But if you don't have all that, or some of your developers need to be brought up to speed, try pantheon - it is a joy to use.

We were able to move to a single bitbucket-hosted codebase without requiring drupal multisite architecture. We've got a site template that lets us spin up a site with a click, and then start creating content right away. Code updates and changes are a breeze. We use drush and terminus to script operations against 100 sites at one time. Runs very smoothly.

We love the lightning fast speeds of its built-in optimization for Wordpress-based websites, the uptime reliability, the automatic daily backups, the automatic core updates to Wordpress, and the multiple development environments. Pantheon gives us the peace of mind we need so that we can focus on web development and digital marketing projects, and never have to worry about websites going down. The multiple development environments also make it incredibly easy for our team to work on new versions of websites all in one place without disrupting the live traffic.

We just wish there was more of a discount for bulk accounts, so we could get more of our accounts onto Pantheon!

I recommend more bulk account discounts. Pantheon still is a huge cost difference versus purchasing a dedicated server or a VPS option. I would love to see a Pantheon semi-dedicated server option or 20+ account option that makes it affordable per account. Our agency also provides pro bono hosting for non-profits and does this at a ratio about 1 pro bono hosted account for every 6 paid accounts we have. At the moment for us, it's difficult to move off of our dedicated server because adding our pro bono accounts to Pantheon is so costly.

Having been in the web development business for over 10 years, I have worked with dozens of different web hosting companies. There are so many hosting companies that it's easy to get lost in the mix, and to choose the cheapest provider. We've done that before and have had some horror stories. Pantheon is our host of choice because when you have a website, you need it to be up 100% of the time, 24/7, 365 days a year; we're happy to say that our Pantheon based sites have never gone down! With Wordpress-based sites, there are often security vulnerabilities -- we love how Pantheon provides some built-in security through the automatic core updates, but more importantly the daily automated backups that happen, allowing you to roll back to a clean version whenever you need to.

The fluid flow of the UI is fantastic and makes managing a DEV, STAGE & PROD environment as simple as it can be. Non-technincal people could pick it up.

The only thing I dislike is that nothing stands out as a problem. If I had to choose anything, it's only because I like to get the most bang for my buck. So maybe the cost could be a little cheaper.

Pantheon and Acquia are my top of the list products. Acquia is great, but for my freelance clients I recommend Pantheon. The difference maker being the cost.

At the moment, I only have one client on the Pantheon platform. The biggest benefit is that security patches were applied without any need to do something. Another client on another host had to be manually patched and it did get hacked and cost me time to fix.

The dev/test/live workflow is great and "multidev" is a lifesaver for larger/complex projects. Automatic backups and restores are also pretty amazing and seamless. Supporting git and SFTP modes gives us flexibility in how we handle different client needs.

The tendency for MySQL connections to change ports/passwords when instances are restarted causes some friction/frustration but it's a minor annoyance. Some SFTP clients that try to remember which folder you were in can get confused by the changing instance names. Migrating some sites that have extra stuff in the webroot can be a pain (but that's technical debt, not Pantheon's fault).

Pantheon's workflow streamlined our workflow by giving us a ready to go and battle-tested approach to managing the quirks of running WordPress in multiple environments. It's saved us time, hassle, and a great deal of sanity during a period of fast growth for our agency.

Ease of backups, deployment, spin up of environments.

Some of the additional features like New Relic, and the CDN are big wins.

It's also nice that the platform was able to protect against some of the latest high-profile security exploits.

The platform still seems shaky. I've used it for years, it used to be horrendous, better now but still seems to let me down when I really need to get stuff done.

The actual CI/CD is a nightmare. I would not be comfortable deploying a high-profile site without an entirely separate chain of build tools.

It also really stinks that "dealing with Pantheon" is a skillset/industry all to itself.

It's fine for basic use. If you've got complex development requirements be prepared to work around the Pantheon.

We're using this for mostly smaller/simple sites. The tools seem to work well to support this case.

The dev, test, live, and multidev environments are awesome.

Pantheon isn't the easiest for non-technical people to work with.

It's worth the price point. However, if you don't have a technical team, it may be challenging for you to get used to their system. It's certainly possible, but it will take time.

Two primary problems:

1. Fast, reliable hosting for my company's website

2. An appealing hosting solution for clients.

When we moved the Bop site to Pantheon, we saw a big uptick in page load speed, which contributes to our SEO.

It's so much easier to sell clients on a third-party hosting solution when we have a company like Pantheon to refer them to. Pantheon's resources and support team are a great help in avoiding the mess that is working with a client's internal IT to set up a server.

Pantheon is a good option for sites that follow what I'd call a basic profile - standard Drupal concepts, only a few if any external backing services (e.g., Solr) - and for whom managing things like a git repo or deployment strategy is too complex.

If your workflow is any different from Pantheon's - e.g., you like to not commit your vendor directory of composer dependencies, or you have backing services that do not exist on Pantheon, or you wish to do more than very basic operations in deploy hooks - this is not the service for you. Their workflow seems like it was designed for D7 and is showing its age as Drupal in particular matures.

Pantheon helps fit a niche for clients who insist on "managed" hosting, and do not require significant customization as outlined above.

I loved that it was affordable Wordpress host

The price increase and removal of new relic

Be aware that the lower tier does not include New Relic error logging like it used to. The biggest complaint I have is that they removed features. I understand that the cost of doing business goes up and they have to update their prices; however, removing features (like New Relic) without offering an alternative (sorry but going from $25 per month to even $125 per month is not a true alternative) is very frustrating. The whole reason I decided to use Pantheon was to remove the need for me to manage my own server but now it is almost worth it to manage my own Wordpress server even with all the headache that could come with that.

Company website hosting.

I like the DEV and TEST environments, in theory, but I have often had things working perfectly on those sites, but then NOT work when I push them to the Live site. So what's the point? Support does respond quickly, the chat is quite useful (although it always says "5 minute response time," and it takes at least 10-15), and they do their best to help (see below).

Nearly everything. I am a designer/developer, meaning I'm pretty solid in PHP and javascript, but I'm not super comfortable in the command line. And yet they have created a platform that requires a lot of work there. A lot of the tech support is sending links to articles. Then when I ask a question about that, they send me a different link to a different article. I don't have enough bad things to say about all of this. If you are going to offer a "dedicated Wordpress platform," then your platform should work the way WP does: updates are made in the Wordpress dashboard and via SFTP. Most of us work in WP because it's flexible and easy. Pantheon may be more robust than less-expensive platforms, but it is -- as far as I am concerned -- total garbage.

Don't.

Not a single one. It creates far more problems than it solves.

Pantheon comes bundled with some great features including a global CDN and SSL provisioning. I can quickly push sites into production. It has an easy backup and restore feature. The account dashboard is easy to use and helps us to view errors. It's a great development pipeline where code is pushed up and content is pulled down.

Pantheon is not designed to be customized all that much. If it fits your needs, particularly with an RE development pipeline, then it can be perfect. If you prefer more control over your server setup, this is probably not the best provider for you.

Pantheon isn't particularly affordable for many smaller businesses. It is worth the price for a variety of reasons, but if you have a smaller budget and need to stick to it, you should try looking elsewhere.

Pantheon is a fantastic website management platform since they specialize in both Drupal and WordPress. It is quite easy to set up development sites in each of these platforms. Pantheon also gives you the ability to build your website in a live URL environment, so we are able to test with a client with ease. Two huge bonuses are that it's easy to set up and restore backups and that it's easy to update Drupal and WordPress core via downstream updates.

CDN, SSL, multidev environments, UI and CLI interfaces for platform functions, git based development workflow and scheduled backups are included and easy to use. Customer service is great and integrated into the dashboard. Managing access to sites is clear and straightforward. The billing and site ownership handoff process is simple and easy to understand even for nontechnical users. In depth and easy to find documentation.

Hopefully they can offer solutions for other content management systems beyond WordPress and Drupal in the future.

I don't think you can find a better level of performance or support for hosting WordPress sites.

Much less time and energy spent on development operations. Easily see who has access to any site. Clear easy to find documentation that facilitates on-boarding staff and clients. Easy site handoff and billing.

That there are 3 options for environments. I like that it takes away all the server and network management. There is less time spent in configuring this Pantheon beast and more time spent deploying and iterating.

I don't like the pricing for small time developers and website owners. It's too much. I don't like having to pay extra to get a custom domain name. That seems like a reason for me to host it myself.

Make the SFTP and module updating for Drupal not cause an outage of Git deployments.

I have a small blog site on a free membership for Pantheon. It sees limited updates.

I've run production drupal websites on pantheon. Those are still in production and run great.

There's almost no downtime. Not that many issues besides performance sometimes.

I like the reliability and dependability of Pantheon. We've been on the platform for several years with changes in developers, adding sites, etc. as well as a few emergency-level issues. Pantheon is generally extremely helpful in all areas and provides timely, clear support.

There was one time when we had a site issue that took a while to solve and the issue got bounced around a bit on the Pantheon side to different reps, making the solution of the issue a bit more difficult. But once the issue was solved, everything went back to normal.

Our business is totally online and we rely on a hosting platform that can handle a lot of traffic, sometimes with 2x-5x our normal traffic in the form of spikes. Pantheon has been great with everything.

The different environments for development (dev->test->live). Multidev environments. Customer service is very helpful and timely. Git compatibility. Huge knowledge database.

Pantheon service is limited to only Drupal and Wordpress. Expensive for low traffic sites.

Their customer service is fantastic!!!

Complex sites being redesigned are less 'messy' to merge content with the multiple dev environments ability to migrate sites easily with Pantheon's migration tool.

In many situations our agency has used the multi dev environments for redesigns.

There were also some instances when pushing new code from dev->test->live, issues have been noticed while in test that avoided catastrophes if it were pushed straight to live.

If I am having issues with sites that I cannot resolve on my own, with nearly anything, contacting the customer service is always helpful.

Being able to sandbox a site without any upfront cost or having to configure a local stack is a really big deal. The Drupal install was fast and easy and I like the ability to move updates from dev to live.

As a newbie, Drupal is hard. It just is. I'd like to see Pantheon partner with someone to deliver a few quality classes on Drupal and Wordpress so that people don't need to hunt those down independently.

I'm working on developing a replacement site for a mid-sized city to replace the aging site we have. I haven't really achieved anything yet, but I have been able to get a much longer leash at my office because I have a platform to develop on.

Version control, SFTP/Git flexibility, speed and reliability. It is a true professional hosting environment at a fraction of the cost and difficulty it would take to roll our own servers at scale.

price is a big jump from shared hosting services. Seems worth it, but it is still a difficult jump. occasionally it can be a bit tricky for non tech staff to navigate simple things like wordpress upgrades.

Do it. It is a solid tool for Wordpress users. The speed jump from shared hosting is very obvious.

Our old hosting was slow and got bogged down with heavy traffic. Today we don't have to worry about server load when we plan online events that correspond to our large scale "real world" events.

I love the fact that I look like a real agency with a test, dev and live site for each Wordpress site that we create. I also like that we have terminal access to pretty much every single action that I would need to do, but there's also way to complete the action in the web app. Superb!

I don't like that I have to go through a ton of hoops to update my Wordpress version. This could be a one-off case, but with my personal site I haven't been update to update in almost a year.

Having a streamlined process and ways for my team to work together on one website. The GIT integration definitely helps speed up our development process.

The Version controlling can be done easily using Pantheon.

It gives support for CMS.

There are three environments:

Test environment, Development environment, Production environment

and it is really easy to make the things live, all you have to do is PUSH it.

It provides the best hosting for CMSs like Drupal and WordPress.

It becomes easy to keep backup and the restore processes of the data as the Pantheon comes with the facility to keep track of all the versions.

I think the awesome product like Pantheon must have that awesome documentation.

The documentation seems incomplete.

Also, it is difficult to process for first time user.

The user must know the process and implementation. It's hard for users of other hosting platforms like Godaddy to copup with Pantheon.

Know the process and implementation steps first.

It is the really awesome product just you have to know how to use it.

We have used it in one of our Drupal projects.

It was very 1st time I was using it so it took some time for understanding but the results we got are really good.

Now we are using all the three environments without any issue.

Adherence to best practices for scalability and implementation.

Always having a sandbox for new features, via the multidev environments.

Support of a team who understands their platform.

Asides from one large global event, outages have been restricted to predictable maintenance or quick resolution with little impact.

A REST API for platform management would be a welcomed addition.

No platform exists that is as simple, well supported, and easier to onboard.

Single, documented, and predictable experience for developers makes on boarding resources a breeze. Instituting a QA process that completely involves the customer, through leveraging cloning and use of the test multidev environments clients can verify changes before deployment The impact is less bugs make it to end users.

It's made by developers for developers so they have thought of everything, cli tools, CI support, backups, etc.. The technology stack just works as you would expect with very little (if any) configuration.

I think more can be done on the marketing side of things. As a developer it's easy to see why Pantheon is obvious but from the client's perspective hand-holding support also matters.

It's the type of product that speaks for itself. Just give it a try and you'll see the difference. Don't ignore the CLI tools.

We aren't spending as much time and resources on infrastructure with our Pantheon projects that we do with traditional hosting or even other platform as a service products.

Spinning up feature branch environments has been very handy. Features can be shown to key players quickly and efficiently.

Though the flexibility is there for spinning multi-environments, it would be nice to not be locked down by the master branch on the deployment of code from DEV > TEST > PROD.

Development teams thrive with Pantheon.

Peace of mind for managing the servers. Uptime is pretty reliable. Having the free SSL option is very useful. This helps reduce costs that are often seen as an after thought. Pantheon has made it very easy for customers to have a secure site without having the hassle of ordering an SSL until they want more protection/privacy.

I love the Pantheon workflow, as a developer it is easy to get going and by default the workflow is great. I hope that more developers adopt this kind of workflow. Also, being able to spin up staging sites on the fly to help fix 1 bug or add 1 feature before pushing to prod is great.

I haven't tried in a while, but previously I was not happy with the lack of support for sub-modules. So if you wanted to have a repo for a plugin, the Pantheon git flow would not support a sub-module as part of the build flow. I have remedied that by just having another local environment for those plugins and volume mapping so I'm not duplicating code.

Keep in mind Pantheon is not for everyone. If you just use a page builder like Beaver Builder and do not know what GIT or FTP is, you are better of with a more novice or entry level hosting. Pantheon is for power uses, developers, and those who care about their environment and don't want to manage it.

Besides workflow, the ability to create a new multi-dev for a new feature idea or to test out a theory is pretty nice. Also allows me to look at building new things and new plugins and quickly have a playground for them.

The possibility to start a project right at the platform and not have kick start it on my laptop is a killer feature. You can pretty much make a fast prototype inside the pantheon platform. The different environments are the best for taking control of whats on my live site while you are developing. Thanks to this you can implement new features and test them with the actual database in your live site. Having terminus is a great help if you like to do be able to do everything from the command lines as most developer like to, and also gives you advantages, you can make a script that will make a site for you and start working on it right from the CLI.

The pricing is not that competitive for a small site, nevertheless, this a solution best suited for big sites.

Do try to implement a solution with them, use the fact that you get access to multiple environments for developing and testing.

Prototyping a website quickly and check if something can be done trivially is brilliant feature. You can actually develop a lot quicker and safer than if you were to have to implement a test and a live environment yourself. The fact that you can rely on Pantheon to handle all the infrastructure is the best possible thing for a web company that wants to focus solely on developing solutions to it's clients.

Setting up new sites is easy. In theory, maintenance should be a breeze, but that's where some of the problems come into play. Customer service (can be) great when you get the right person.

Where do I start. The customer service ranges from great to terrible. On the terrible spectrum, you get people who don't really take time to read your tickets and they tend to talk above you and assume that you know everything technical involved in hosting websites. I have had issues with several of the sites that I have hosted on this platform and some of them couldn't even be solved. Plugin aren't compatible, fatal errors, the list goes on. With NO solution in sight.

Please make sure you have a capable IT or Web department that you can work with when it comes to this program. I do not like that they assume that you know everything. I can't get straight answers to certain things and it has left me frustrated as hell.

We needed a hosting platform where we would be able to keep track and update 20+ sites at any given time. There IS a benefit to having each of them in one location and being able to work on them in batches.

*Did

*What DID I like best?

Multi-Dev for individual users this was literally one of your best features by far. On an enterprise level Im glad that you are keeping it as a legacy item, but on a personal dev level I will be migrating my accounts and builds elsewhere as I would like to add new developers to the projects im working on.

Multi Dev is becoming a legacy feature. Anyone worth recommending pantheon have already started the talks to determine where next to migrate to sustain the dev community, as this shuts out new developers who haven't been grandfathered in.

For development I understand the need to manually commit changes, but for practical day to day updates pushed live within the drupal environment it should be an auto commit; I have had co-workers (of the luddite type) that will make micro changes on the live site without informing me and it would be erased when I clear the cache prior to cloning and prepping for upflow.

I

web presence, information architecture, structural flexibility and adaptability secure enough to last a minimum of 3 years (normally 5-7) with how fast everything is currently moving.

Only benefit: I actually appreciate that you care about your product and do try to provide the best documentation to support users and their decisions. I understand that a majority of your business is enterprise so their needs drive the functionality and usability of the site, as you pointed out in the "your pricing package change" email you sent out. I have benefited from being well informed from the source, as to make healthy decisions moving forward.

Ease of development workflows. Pantheon is great for tracking code changes and working with teams.

Platform reliability and cost. I've experienced at least one issue each month with workflows not working, and even the entire platform being down at one point.

When the platform goes down, you are completely helpless. You're left trying to open tickets and waiting on Pantheon engineers to resolve your issues. Given that the platform costs significantly more than other alternatives, this is really frustrating. I've migrated major sites off of the platform because the Enterprise level service is not affordable and the self serve plans do not afford sufficient control.

Pantheon is a good fir for businesses who will use teams to work on their website, but do not have the technical experience to leverage cloud platforms live AWS. For businesses that do have technical expertise, Pantheon could be very frustrating because you lose control.

Pantheon offers a well defined work flow to control development process among teams.

Pantheon's host of features are great! It's easy to maintain and consistently update multiple sites running on the same platform and is perfect for businesses that manage hundreds of thousands of websites that need to be maintained on a daily basis.

Sometimes, the servers go down on Pantheon and it affects all sites running on the platform. This can be a major setback combined with the wrong workflow of a company and it gets frustrating that these issues come up and there's little to no control on the developer's side of things to mitigate these issues from frequently happening.

If you're looking for a web hosting platform that makes it easy to manage hundreds of thousands of websites built on the same architecture with some useful automation on the side, Pantheon is the way to go!

Being able to update hundreds of websites running on wordpress at the same time has been a major boon for our business and allows us to spin up and develop sites for clients quickly.

I'm not a professional developer but as a digital marketer who loves Drupal, Pantheon makes it easy to keep my sites up to date. Trying to keep Drupal core and modules current can be a challenge unless you have a a developer in your pocket. Pantheon makes that unnecessary.

You also get a free development sandbox to play with, that comes with all the trappings of a live site without the custom domain name. Once you decide to flip the switch, it's pretty easy and reasonably priced.

Well....that I have to pay for it? :D They are reasonably priced tho

As a non-developer, make sure that any developers you hire/contract are very familiar with the CMS you plan on using, be it Drupal, WP, or something else.

I don't have to keep a developer on staff to keep Drupal core and modules up to date. I only have to hire a developer to do actual web work on the site.