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Pantheon.io individual hosting technologies are not necessarily unique. Capabilities such as cloud hosting, automatic scaling, redundancy, content delivery, backups, and security can also be implemented using Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, or other managed hosting providers.
The more meaningful distinction is how these capabilities are packaged and managed.
Pantheon provides an opinionated, standardized hosting environment specifically designed for operating websites. This can reduce infrastructure complexity and shift a portion of the operational responsibility from the organization and its technical vendors to the platform provider.
For a website, the resulting value can be summarized in three areas:
- Performance: Infrastructure and content delivery are designed to provide a responsive visitor experience.
- Operational efficiency: Less technical effort devoted to maintaining hosting infrastructure, allowing resources to focus on website improvements.
- Consistency: A common hosting and deployment model that can make a portfolio of websites easier to govern, maintain, and support.
Pantheon Hosting Capabilities & Service Tiers
Pantheon provides a common set of hosting capabilities across its plans, with additional capacity, resilience, security, support, and service-level commitments available at higher tiers.
Basic provides access to much of Pantheon's underlying hosting architecture. Moving to a higher tier is primarily about increasing capacity, performance, resilience, service levels, and enterprise capabilities rather than moving to an entirely different hosting platform.
Core Capabilities
- Development, staging, and production environments
- Deployment workflow and built-in version control
- Backups
- Logging
- Global CDN
- Caching
- Command-line management tools
- Support for WordPress and Drupal
- SOC 2, GDPR, and FERPA compliance
Website Traffic and Scalability
The current published tiers provide approximately:
| Site Plan | Monthly Visits | Application Containers |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | 35,000 | 1 |
| Performance Small | 35,000 | 1 |
| Performance Medium | 70,000 | 2 |
| Performance Large | 210,000 | 3 |
| Performance XL | 420,000 | 4 |
| Performance 2XL* | 840,000 | 4 |
| Elite | Unlimited / custom | 4+ with managed scaling |
*Performance 2XL is shown elsewhere in Pantheon's current plan selector and may require specific workspace/configuration arrangements.
The number of PHP workers and available application memory also increases with the Performance tiers. This is the capability most directly related to audience size and website demand.
A smaller informational website may have little reason to purchase significantly more hosting capacity. A heavily visited institutional website, campaign destination, news site, or other high-profile digital property may benefit from multiple application containers and greater processing capacity.
The appropriate tier should therefore be based on actual and anticipated website demand rather than selecting the highest tier simply because it offers more infrastructure.
Website Availability
| Level | Most Appropriate For | Primary Value |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | Smaller, lower-traffic or lower-risk websites | Managed Pantheon infrastructure without paying for unnecessary capacity |
| Performance Small–XL/2XL | Business-critical sites with increasing traffic and performance requirements | Progressively greater application capacity and traffic allowance |
| Elite | High-traffic or mission-critical websites | Managed scaling and contractual uptime commitment |
| Platinum/Diamond Workspace | Enterprise portfolios and highly critical digital properties | Multi-zone resilience, advanced security, SSO, and priority support |
| Gold Workspace | Professional teams actively developing and managing websites | Enhanced development, testing, updates, and portfolio-management capabilities |
Costs
See the Web Hosting page for the current costs of Pantheon.io hosting at UCSF.
Additional Information
- Pantheon Managed Cloud Hosting — Additional information about Pantheon's Google Cloud hosting architecture and capabilities.
- Pantheon Pricing and Plans — Current pricing tiers, capacity, features, and service-level information.