Pantheon reviews

Pantheon, Secure and Speedy Wordpress and Drupal Web Hosting

After 10+ years of exploring over 50 web hosting providers, I went from shared web hosting to semi-dedicated servers to running my own dedicated servers. A few years ago though, I decided I wanted to no longer have to manage a server and worry about the headaches of downtime, security breaches, and server performance issues. I began hunting for the perfect web host provider for my Wordpress-based websites. That search led me to Pantheon.

Pantheon was the first Wordpress specialty web host that I was introduced to, and I have been with them for over 4 years now. They optimize their network of servers in a way that allows your Wordpress (or Drupal) site to easily scale up and down to handle even your busiest traffic days and your slowest.

What convinced me about Pantheon was their dedication to constantly becoming the fastest Wordpress web host available. While that is now a hotly contested title, Pantheon definitely won awards during their first three years.

For me, I love Pantheon's speed and also the three environments you are given (development, staging, and live). They also provide daily backups, with easy one-click restores, along with free SSL through Let's Encrpyt, and some basic customer service.

One of my biggest issues with Pantheon that has led me to host some of my other websites elsewhere has been that their custom infrastructure requires you to make all file edits, plugin installations, plugin updates, and theme edits in their development environment first. (There are no write permissions allowed in their live environment.) This can be quite annoying if all you want to do is update plugins regularly, and not be forced to have to clone the development environment to live environment to do this.

I also think their customer service is fairly weak if you aren't paying for the higher plans.

Overall, Pantheon is a pretty good choice, but they have a lot of stiff competition right now. If you need 3 environments, Pantheon is a great choice.

Biggest Pro: Speedy Hosting for Wordpress and Drupal Sites
Biggest Con: Their custom infrastructure is sometimes a pain to work with, as you have to make plugin updates and theme edits in Dev first