We’ve been building, supporting, and maintaining WordPress since when we were founded in 2006. Through those years we’ve explored nearly a dozen hosting providers such as GoDaddy, MediaTemple, Linode, WP Engine, AWS, SiteGround, and Flywheel to name a few. Given the fact that our clients rely on us to make the best technical decisions for them as possible it’s imperative we make the right ones. Pantheon has overdelivered on our expectations as a provider and have raised the bar on what a provider can and should deliver. While Pantheon offers many benefits I’ve listed what I feel are the most important points below.
Reliability
From support to uptime, to performance we’ve been able to consistently rely on Pantheon for keeping both their product up and operational as well as the sites we host with them while also being thoughtful around how our account is managed.
- 99.9% Historical Uptime
- Support has always been responsive, knowledgeable and has assisted to resolve issues on repeated occassions.
- Account management has always assisted our team to help work through advanced technical issues and escalate when needed.
- We rarely experience issues with their web portal which enables our team to work efficiently on client products.
A Superior Product
The Pantheon dashboard and site management product is far superior to what we’ve seen in the market. The tools in place help Nolte to work more efficiently resulting in less time managing DevOps and more time focusing on how we deliver value to our clients and the users of their products.
- Structured and flexible development, testing, ad-hoc, and production environments
- Custom Upstreams to allow for enforced standards, one click updates, and customization
- Ability to automation and build on top of the platform through automation and APIs
- Application Monitoring via New Relic
- Git and version control on all environments
Site & WordPress Performance
Site performance is of the utmost importance to us as the majority of the products we manage have some level of business critically inherent to the sites. Given the fact that performance has a direct business impact and our mission is to help our clients grow this needs to be top of mind.
- Managed HTTPS
- A Global CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Advanced Page Caching
- Redis & Varnish Caching
- SSD Underlying Infrastructure
- Highly Performant PHP & Tuned MySQL Implementations
This benchmark has some great insights marking Pantheon #1 against many top hosts.
Security
Our clients rely on us to keep their products, users, and businesses secure and Pantheon helps ensure that we meet their expectations.
- Container based secure infrsastructure
- Best data safeguard practices
- Automated updates, security monitoring, backups and retention
- Denial of service and network intrusion protection
- Authentication best practices (SAML/SSO/2FA)
- Secure code and database access
- Secure data centers
Learn more about Pantheon’s security practices here
Expert Support
We’ve tested the reliability of Pantheon’s support team on several occassions and they’ve continued to meet or exceed our expectations. The support for agencies extends to training on how to use the tools, group virtual trainings and a host of other resources. The standard site support team has been awesome and provides expert level support through agents that really get WordPress and Pantheon’s product. We’ve saved thousands in resource costs from this point alone.
Some areas where the Pantheon suporrt has overdelivered:
- Live training for Nolte’s engineering team
- Co-creation of open-source tools that help us build better products faster
- Occasional engineering support on products
- Detailed technical instruction related to product optimization
Versatility
Balancing agility with standardization is often a difficult task. In our experience with many of the previous partners we’ve found that they are usually good at one focus area of hosting such as content sites that scale or WooCommerce. These were difficult lessons but helped us to identify the right type of partner for the types of work we do. We’ve put Pantheon to the test with all types of WordPress sites such as:
- Headless sites with multi-tenant front-ends
- Highly trafficked WooCommerce / WordPress sites
- Mobile applications powered by a WordPress JSON API
Have questions around how we’ve gotten the most out of the Pantheon platform or looking for more info on how to build a solution on top of the platform we’d love to hear more. Leave a comment or contact us.