Announcing Panethon Partnership!
February 11, 2020 | Parker Mathewson, CEO of The Rite Sites
I love hosting through Pantheon, and have for a while. As an agency, we have started to bring our clients to the Pantheon platform and we have seen great success every step of the way. When we first started our business here at The Rite Sites, we went an all too common route: self hosting. We found this to be very flexible while also being extremely time consuming. There was always something to be tinkering with on the server and drawing our attention to the security of our website.
With the approval of our clients at the time, we started exploring more options. We tried shared hosting with different companies, virtual private servers at others, inherited servers from clients, and dedicated hardware, too. All these had some commonalities: they were not optimized, not even close to fully secure, and took our attention away from building all the lovely tools our clients want and need to keep their businesses running smoothly and efficiently. So we kept looking for the right kind of host that allows flexibility, a secure and stable environment, and of course, quick responses from the servers! With our next client at that time, we tried out Pantheon.
Immediately, we were very impressed with Pantheon. They offer tiered plans that can fit any business size, and for what I think to be an amazing price. Within a month of developing, testing, and releasing a website on Pantheon, I made the executive decision to migrate our website over to Pantheon. It came down to a couple reasons:
- For the same website (plugins, themes, and all) Pantheon's response time was far better than any of the environments we were running on.
- The separation of environments (Dev, Test, Live) allowed for an efficient streamlined Development and Release process while being safe and secure in testing.
- Pantheon's toolkit is only growing and making a better and more satisfactory experience for everyone, from developers, to designers, to website admins.
- For what Pantheon provides, the price is stellar!
Starting in 2017 we migrated all of our E-Commerce clients and websites over to Pantheon and have gotten glowing reviews from everyone. That is not to say we did not get some pushback from clients to change their whole hosting platform, many of whom were fine with their current situation. One of the biggest hurdles on getting the migrations started was the price difference. Going from a shared hosting platform costing under $10 a month to host an E-Commerce store, to even the lowest tier at Pantheon (around $35+ a month) can feel like a huge change for smaller companies, let alone the steep jump to the next tier ($125+ per month).
Getting to the heart of it
Let us examine the reasons why I personally think this price is extremely fair:
- Not only are you getting your main live website for your customers to visit, you are getting a secure testing environment that is/can be completely identical to your live environment, that can be accessed anywhere (not just on your site admins local computer)
- Pantheon.io is a company that specializes in Drupal and WordPress hosting, and has built their whole infrastructure (software and hardware) to be able to run these frameworks efficiently and securely. Pantheon becomes your system administrator when you host through them, which according to Glassdoor.com the average salary is $65,000 a year. That is over $5,400 a month, a lot more expensive than ANY hosting plan Pantheon offers.
- Even if you would not have a System Administrator in the traditional sense, but rather hired one for initial configuration, you would fall out of maintenance quickly and be missing important security updates. Pantheon handles these for you, on a much larger and more professional scale than part time system administrators can handle.
- Pantheon's infrastructure is built to grow and shrink to the load of your website (to a minimum) without anyone having to intervene to ensure a fluid and smooth experience for all website visitors whether 1 person is on the website, or 1,000 simultaneously (which is a LOT!) -- though some conditions apply.
Overall, our experience with Pantheon has been nothing short of amazing, and as The Rite Sites keeps growing, we decided it was time to throw our support behind our amazing experiences at Pantheon as the new decade is upon us.
We here at The Rite Sites cannot wait to leverage all the new tools and workflows Pantheon.io continues to release, and we wish them great success in all their business ventures!