Pantheon Review (2018)

Pantheon participated for the fourth time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). Last year Pantheon earned two Top Tier awards. This review is based off the results of this years test.

Pantheon stepped up their game this year and earned three Top Tier awards and one honorable mention. Pantheon also has the honor of being the highest rated company on Review Signal for reviews based on customer opinions (84%).

The Products

Plan Name	Plan Monthly Price	Plan Visitors Allowed	Plan Memory/RAM	Plan Disk Space	Plan Bandwidth	Plan Sites Allowed
Personal Plan	$25	10,000 (with no overage charges)	1024MB	5GB	Unlimited	1
Professional	$100	100,000	2048	20GB	Unlimited	1
Business	$400	500,000	8192	30GB	Unlimited	1
Elite	$1,667	Unlimited	Unlimited	100GB+	Unlimited	1

Performance Review

Load Storm

Plan Tier	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)
$25-50	292,393	5	220.72	162.44	4,287	162	22.79	17.5	12.66
$51-100	445,581	37	336.4	247.54	15,086	172	33.78	26.65	18.77
$200-$500	702,823	7,065	544.27	390.46	11,462	455	52.65	43.64	29.25
Enterprise	1,370,325	88	1,088.48	761.29	7,147	154	106.71	85.72	59.28

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

Pantheon overall did very well. The only issue was in the $200-500 price range it started to show signs of load. It wasn't a huge issue and the plan still earned an honorable mention in the price tier.

Load Impact

Plan Tier	Requests	Errors	Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Average Load Time (Seconds)	Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)	Peak Average Requests/Sec
$25-50	426896	0	23.73	0.159	401	880
$51-100	847397	0	47.26	0.196	773	1650
$200-$500	1257940	0	69.92	0.173	1020	2240
Enterprise	2046874	0	113.47	0.181	1660	3650

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

Pantheon aced the LoadImpact tests across every price tier. Zero errors on all four tests and maintained a sub 200 millisecond response time average. Couldn't ask for a better performance.

Uptime

Plan Tier	UptimeRobot	StatusCake
$25-50	100	100
$51-100	100	100
$200-$500	99.97	100
Enterprise	100	100

Not a whole lot to say here other than excellent. 100% uptime across the board except one monitor out of two showing 99.97%.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Plan Tier	$25-50	$51-100	$200-$500	Enterprise
Dulles	0.355	0.354	0.353	0.374
Denver	1.57	1.493	1.236	1.322
LA	0.797	0.804	0.804	0.712
London	0.448	0.446	0.45	0.474
Frankfurt	0.369	0.356	0.375	0.428
Rose Hill, Mauritius	1.093	1.074	1.088	0.912
Singapore	0.433	0.449	0.045	0.426
Mumbai	0.692	0.64	0.662	0.522
Japan	0.419	0.39	0.393	0.366
Sydney	0.528	0.503	0.516	0.497
Brazil	0.405	0.408	0.4	0.384

The WPT tests were pretty phenomenal, I rarely comment on these because it's rare a company stands out so much. Once you left the US, Pantheon was often the fastest amongst their peers. Their global coverage appears to be top notch out of the box.

Plan Tier	PHP Bench	WP Bench
$25-50	9.914	163.2120124
$51-100	9.229	276.2430939
$200-$500	8.723	294.55081
Enterprise	8.708	235.9046945

The WPPerformanceTester results were pretty consistent. Since it's supposed to be the same platform that scales up, the results looking similar seems to make sense. The slight improvement in PHP bench scores as you scale is nice, but without a lot of repeated testing, unclear if that's by design or just a happy coincidence.

Conclusion

Another year, another fabulous performance from Pantheon. Not only are they the highest rated company on Review Signal's reviews - they consistently earn top tier performance awards in our testing. They stepped up their game from last year and earned an extra Top Tier performance award and an honorable mention. Their global response times were maybe the most impressive feature. They earned fastest average response time in 3/4 tiers on Load Impact and 2/4 on Load Storm, along with often having the fastest response time in their price tiers on WebPageTest. Overall, it was a pretty impressive performance from Pantheon this year.