Pantheon Reviews

I have been a customer of Pantheon for more then 8 years. They are extremely expensive, but that's ok, since I believe you get what you pay for.

However, in the past year they have gone to just plain AWFUL for what you get. If a bunch of bots attack your site, they charge you (a LOT!). They say they can prevent it, but they don't.

Poor sites with less then 5,000 real visitors a month are being charged an extra $600 A MONTH for 'excess traffic'. And since it is profit for Pantheon, they don't care to fix it.

Host anywhere else and save money.

Date of experience: April 25, 2024

The supposed advantage of Pantheon is their managed service / support layer, with routine tasks like keeping sites updated. Unfortunately this fails all the time now. It seems the recent round of layoffs mean that support is basically non-existent. Their core business is at the enterprise level who, I would hope, get better service.

Sadly they now offer nothing useful at the SME level, and you can get more reliable hosting for a third of the price elsewhere. A shame - a once good company now completely down the toilet.

Date of experience: May 17, 2023

Great hosting company. It provides a panel that is easy enough for regular customers to use, but enables developers to do advanced features, such us multi-dev environments, backups, site-cloning. It has several tools for developers and can also be used with a custom CI setup. They have good support as well, their team members have great knowledge about their tools and won't mind stepping into your site to troubleshoot any issues or propose improvements.

Date of experience: July 05, 2022

This used to be a decent platform, but has deteriorated beyond belief. A very strange architecture, with no shell access, and an odd configuration of git. They also have their own distributions of Drupal and Wordpress that they try and force on you, which come with their own issues. The opposite of developer-friendly if you ask me.

The support used to be top tier, but has completely disintegrated - you will get the most banal answers but even the lightest technical question will get the answer that the issue is "out of scope". The supposed support is why this is such an expensive offering, but they've obviously made massive cuts.

Might be alright if you're paying tens of thousands a month for enterprise level, but absolutely useless for any SME.

Date of experience: September 21, 2023

I am a professional developer and I work with dozens of servers. The Pantheon set up is horrible and very buggy. Customer service is inept and takes way too long to diagnose / solve issues. The dev-test-live workflow does not work well, and neither does multidev. I am stuck with dealing with them since my enterprise client has a contract with them.
Avoid at all costs.

Date of experience: May 23, 2023

I switched exclusively to using Pantheon.io for all hosting back in 2014 because I got tired of non-developer-centric hosting. Pantheon treats the security and performance of websites as a first consideration rather than as an afterthought. I love that Pantheon locks down the live site as read-only so that site defacements are nearly impossible. The dev/test/live structured developer workflow improves how developers and marketing teams work together to more quickly launch sites and publish content.

Date of experience: June 30, 2022

*The good:*

Pantheon's infrastructure provides a very good experience for freelancers and small teams developing WordPress sites. The Dev>Test>Live and Multi-dev environments work well when used with Lando for local development.

*The bad:*

Pantheon's architecture has a number of quirks ranging from the strange to the infuriating. Some plugins are just not compatible with Pantheon's hosting environment. While there are workarounds in many cases, they are often tricky to implement well - especially on a Windows dev machine.

*The ugly:*

Pantheon's support staff seem friendly but are completely unable to provide any real help. It feels as though their only job is to deflect any support request away from Pantheon, blaming your code, plugins or anything that would be outside of Pantheon's remit.

In almost every interaction I've had with them the conversation has gone around in circles, even when I've given irrefutable evidence of a platform problem

For the price they charge, I would expect better support.


Overall I would not recommend Pantheon unless you are happy troubleshooting issues yourself and using "community" support.

Date of experience: June 22, 2023

We signed up to Panthoen's hosting and accidentally clicked on the wrong plan. We immediately notified customer support and asked to be moved to the plan we intended to sign up for and for a partial refund to cover the price difference. Despite multiple messages with online support to explain the circumstance this was refused - which I find highly unethical. We were trialing Pantheon for one of our smaller sites and had every intention of moving multiple sites with millions of visitors to this company but am glad not to be dealing with a company that engages in such unethical practices. The terms may claim no refunds but I for one do not want to do business with a company that treats its customers this way and takes advantage of a misplaced click.

Date of experience: March 23, 2023

Pantheon has been literally a nightmare to work with for several years, which has been further compounded recently as we have tried to downgrade and move off of their service.

First, they were charging us $60,000+ annually for hosting of two websites, neither of which get more than 5,000 visitors in a good month. We are on their Elite hosting plan currently. When we raised this concern with them and asked to downgrade, we were told it was impossible to downgrade.

Upon further complaining and badgering, they finally agreed to downgrade us, but that process has been opaque and horrible at best. Mind you, as part of being an Elite customer, we are guaranteed support, help, the best customer service — none of which we received during this process.

Instead, we were saddled with a person who refused to take our calls or answer our questions. And they're not hard questions either - questions like, should we move to the Small or Medium plan? What's the difference? Or questions like, can you confirm we only have one contract with you for our two sites?

Every time we asked a question, we were never answered. Every time we asked for a call — or called our rep directly — they never answered. Now they're telling us that in the process of downgrading our service our site may be down for an indeterminate period of time. When asked how long, there's no answer. And if our rep doesn't know the answers, that's not unreasonable — but they also have made no effort to connect us with someone who does, despite multiple requests.

Our contract expires in a number of days. They have no concern for our experience, or our customer's experience. Don't do business with these people unless you're looking to be totally screwed.

Date of experience: March 28, 2023

Date of experience: April 23, 2024

Fantastic PAAS. Rock-solid performance, developer-focused platform. Great support. Reasonable pricing and plenty of overage forgiveness

Date of experience: November 01, 2021