I was recently introduced to a client hosted on Pantheon.io, a hosting platform packed with some really great features, services, and tech support. I really like their site as well, their catchy logo just put the cherry on top. After using Pantheon for a couple days, I couldn’t help but spend some quality time with this hosting platform. Let me tell you, user interface goes a long way when choosing a hosting platform at least for me.
If you’re using WordPress or Drupal, this is an excellent hosting platform. The platform shines even more when you’re looking to integrate SFTP and Git into your workflow. I’ve seen several sites attempt at designing their own workflow and it looks pretty messy. Committing a large plugin into your repository and managing media files can get pretty hairy when you’re working with teams. Panetheon.io specializes in alleviating this headache by allocating and linking each module to it’s own dedicated container – at least this is what I’ve observed.
Pantheon’s easy to use Dashboard
Panethion.io Documentation
Let me start with documentation. When you’re developer, one of the first things you want to see, and noticeably obvious is documentation. Because of Pantheon’s easy to use UI and workflows, documentation is just easier to digest. You have a dev, test and live environment – this is the way it should be. No need to add extra layers of settings and configurations.
Tech & Online Chat Support
When it comes to hosting, yeah there’s pricing, security, performance which are paramount for any site hosting platform. But when think that I love (yes love) is Pantheon’s online chat support – their response time is usually within 5 minutes and their tech’s are friendly, willing to help and are patient in solving your issue no matter how big or small it may be. Another thing I really like about their chat interface is the ability to attach images to further highlight your issue – I really take advantage of this. The visuals always help. So major props to their techs over there at Panethon.io
Quickstart Guide
Looping back to documentation, Panetheon.io adds an additional Quick Start Guide to quickly get your site up and running. From setting up your dev environment and workflows, Pantheon has you covered. I felt safe and secure knowing that I can always refer to this and since Pantheon seems to be up on top of things, I can be rest assured documentation is up to date when any changes or new features.
Pantheon’s Live Demo
Yes, you heard it – live demo. I don’t see this often with hosting platforms. This tells me that they really care about educating their users, subscribers and developers. They’re pretty upfront about this service – there’s a sign up form where you can quickly set up a time to catch the next demo at your convenience.
To conclude, Pantheon is pretty transparent with their intentions and I think this is where they are able to capture the market. There are other similar hosting platforms that have emerged including Digital Ocean and Linode. Of these mentioned though I found Pantheon to be the most easy to use. I will cover Linode and Digital Ocean in another post so stay tuned for that. This is just a general overview, I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ll revisit more advanced topics as I dive in deeper into containers out lined here – https://pantheon.io/docs/application-containers/.