Pantheon is a web development platform that has been catering to the Drupal community. It was founded in 2010. I saw a presentation about it about a year ago. The presenter talked about how you could use this platform for Drupal and it was very interesting, but I wasn’t building any Drupal sites for my clients.
Fast forward to 2014 when I see an announcement that Pantheon will begin offering the same web development platform for WordPress. Now they had my attention.
What I really like about this platform is that it is scaleable. It grows as your business grows without having to change servers. The pricing is based on pageviews. The monthly fees start at $25 for 10,000 pageviews, but you can get access to the developer sandbox for free. They don’t even ask for a credit card. The developer sandbox plan includes two test sites you won’t get charged for until you make them live.
The other part that really intrigued me is that Pantheon includes three environments for your site — Dev, Test and Live. This is great for people who don’t have their own servers but still want to take advantage of having three versions of the site to test, make changes, get approvals, then push live. When you are ready to go live, you can send a link for your client to pay for the hosting.
Here’s a sample of the dashboard for Dev:
Clicking between Dev, Test, and Live switches you to each individual dashboard for that site. You can also add team members to give them access by clicking on Team.
Here’s a sample of the dashboard for Live:
You can see that the Live Environment hasn’t been created yet. It is created simply by clicking the Clone the Testing Environment now to create the Live environment button. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
I was able to easily upload an existing WordPress site by uploading a Backup Buddy backup file. I didn’t have any problems.
My thoughts on the Pantheon platform for WordPress:
- I really like the ability for the site to scale as it gains more viewers.
- Uploading an existing site or creating a new one is really easy.
- The Dev, Test and Live environments are something I have wanted for a long time. Pantheon makes this easy.
- I’m used to using Cpanel, so getting used to GIT has been a learning process. Things that used to be really easy are now things I need to learn. One example of this is making changes in the database.
- I like Backup Buddy, but it doesn’t work on this platform for file sizes over 250mb. You can make backups from the dashboard and download them to your machine.
Overall, I’m really excited about building sites on the Pantheon platform. You can find more information on their site getpantheon.com (Not an affiliate link).