Pantheon WordPress Hosting Review (2016)

Pantheon participated for the third time in WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks. They've done well in the past earning top tier status in both previous tests. This year they had four plans entered into the following ranges: $25-50/month, $51-100/month, $201-500/month and Enterprise ($500+/month).

Products

Company	Plan	Monthly Price	Visitors Allowed	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Sites Allowed
Pantheon 25-50	Personal	$25	10,000	5GB	Unlimited	1
Pantheon 51-100	Professional	$100	100,000	20GB	Unlimited	1
Pantheon 201-500	Business	$400	500,000	30GB	Unlimited	1
Pantheon Enterprise	Elite	$1,666.66	Unlimited	100GB+	Unlimited	Priced Per Site

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Performance Review

LoadStorm Results

Company	Total Requests	Total Errors	Peak RPS	Average RPS	Peak Response Time(ms)	Average Response Time(ms)	Total Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Throughput (MB/s)	Average Throughput (MB/s)
Pantheon 25-50	268164	866	205.5	148.98	14422	315	6466	4.927	3.592
Pantheon 51-100	409962	57051	325.53	227.76	11682	762	20.74	17.97	11.52
Pantheon 201-500	629578	49212	510.78	349.77	15091	1353	33.88	28.9	18.82
Pantheon Enterprise	1295178	9964	1014.58	719.54	15101	786	30.86	24.18	17.15

LoadStorm test logged in thousands of users to simulate heavy uncached load on the server, scaling up with more users on larger plans after the $25-50/month range. Pantheon did well at the entry level and the enterprise level. The 51-100 and 201-500 range the load exceeded the capacity of the containers hosting the sites. Pantheon showed they definitely can scale at the Enterprise level, but some of the mid-range of their lineup struggled to keep up with our tests.

Blitz Results

Company	Hits	Errors	Timeouts	Average Hits/Second	Average Response Time	Fastest Response	Slowest Response
Pantheon 25-50	27755	0	0	463	61	60	67
Pantheon 51-100	55499	0	0	925	61	60	64
Pantheon 201-500	83211	2	0	1387	61	61	68
Pantheon Enterprise	138607	4	27	2310	62	60	80

The Blitz test is designed to make sure that static assets (which should be served from cache) are being handled properly and can scale to very heavy big spikes in traffic. If the LoadStorm test was a clinic, this was absolute perfection. Pantheon had no issue with the Blitz tests at any level with near perfect results across every tier.

Uptime

Company	StatusCake	UptimeRobot
Pantheon 25-50	100	100
Pantheon 51-100	100	100
Pantheon 201-500	99.98	99.98

2/3 were perfect and the third was 99.98%. Pantheon did excellent in the uptime department.

Uptime wasn't tracked on most Enterprise level plans because they are just so expensive that it felt wasteful to run them for a long period doing nothing but monitoring uptime if the company had other plans in the testing which could also be measured.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

I mention these because they are in the full testing but I won't bother putting them here. No company had any significant issue with either and it's not worth writing about. If you're very interested in seeing the geographical response times on WPT or what the raw computing power test of WPPerformanceTester measured, read the full results.

Conclusion

Pantheon earned two Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance awards this year, for their entry level Personal plan and their Enterprise level plan. They definitely can scale for enormous sites and compete with the biggest companies in the space. The only place they struggled this year was the mid-range of their offerings during the LoadStorm test. It's by far the most stressful test and the $201-500 range was the most difficult price/performance point of any of the price brackets. Pantheon has a very unique platform compared to the rest of the field that's exceptionally developer-centric and focused around building a toolkit for teams of developers to work on a site in an opinionated workflow. If you like that workflow, you get an amazing toolkit combined with scalable performance.