Site Hosting Plans and Addons

Learn how to purchase and manage site plans and addons.

Discuss in our Forum Discuss in Slack

This section covers purchasing a new plan.

Before You Begin

  • Elite sites cannot manage plans from the Site Dashboard. Contact Sales or reach out to your dedicated Client Sales Executive for details.

  • The permission to manage a site's plan is granted only to the roles of Site Owner / Organization Administrator. Other roles do not have access to change the site plan as described on this page. Pantheon for EDU+ allows Organization Administrators to manage site plans for sites within their organization. When a site is associated with an EDU+ Organization, billing is managed through a contract with Pantheon, and only Organization Administrators can confirm a site plan change. For details, see Role-Based Permissions & Change Management.

  • If you need to assume site and billing ownership, the current Site Owner must transfer ownership to you directly.

In addition, consider the following changes to feature access before upgrading or downgrading the site's plan. Certain scenarios require code changes in order to safely change the site plan.

Disable Addons When Downgrading to Basic Plan

Object Cache (formerly Redis) and Pantheon Search are not available for Basic sites. These features must be disabled in order to select Basic as the new site plan when upgrading or downgrading plans.

To remove these addons:

Object Cache

  1. Uninstall the WP Redis plugin.

  2. Delete the wp-content/object-cache.php file.

  3. Commit and deploy these changes to the Live environment.

  4. Go to Settings, select Add Ons, then click the Remove button for Redis.

  5. Go to the Site Dashboard, and click Clear Caches.

  1. Uninstall the Solr Search for WordPress plugin.

  2. Ensure the default search mechanism is functioning.

  3. Commit and deploy these changes to the Live environment.

  4. Go to Settings, click Add Ons, and then click Remove for Solr.

Object Cache

  1. Disable the Redis Object Cache module.

  2. Delete the Redis configuration from settings.php.

  3. Commit and deploy these changes to the Live environment.

  4. Go to Settings, select Add Ons, then click Remove for Redis.

  5. Go to the Site Dashboard, and click Clear Caches.

Pantheon Search

  1. Disable the Apache Solr Search,Search API Solr Search, and the Pantheon Apache Solr modules.

  2. Delete all schema configurations from settings.php.

  3. Commit and deploy these changes to the Live environment.

  4. Go to Settings, click Add Ons, and then click Remove for Solr.

Upgrades

Site plan upgrades will change your site's resources and access to features immediately. The associated card will be charged a prorated amount for the remainder of the current billing period.

If your site benefits from Preferred Pricing, contact the site's Supporting Workspace for assistance in order to retain your special pricing rate.

Downgrades

Site plan downgrades will change your site's resources and access to features immediately. Beginning on the next billing cycle, the associated card will be charged for the new site plan. No prorated refunds or credits will be issued for site downgrades.

If your site benefits from Preferred Pricing, contact your Supporting Workspace for assistance, in order to retain your special pricing rate.

Custom domains are not available to Sandbox sites. Downgrading to a Sandbox site will automatically delete existing custom domains across all environments of the site. If you decide to return to a paid plan in the future, you will need to add the domains again.

Downgrading to a Sandbox site will disable automatic backups. You will still be able to create backups manually. Refer to the Backups Tool for more information.

Purchase a Plan

To purchase a plan for a site:

 Note

Pantheon offers savings for sites purchased with annual billing. Refer to Pantheon Annual Billing for more information.

  1. Go to the Site Dashboard.

  2. For Sandbox sites, click Upgrade next to the site's name. Otherwise, click the current plan tag next to the site's name.

  3. Click Select for the plan you wish to purchase.

  4. Enter your billing information. Site ownership is designated to the user account entering billing information.

  5. Make sure the Plan details are correct.

  6. Verify the card shown in Billing details.

  7. Click the Submit button.

The Site Owner will receive an email confirmation of this change, a new invoice will be issued, and a prorated amount for the current billing cycle will be credited or charged to the associated card automatically.

Invoices and transaction history related to this change can be found in Account > Billing.

Enable Add-ons

You can enable the following add-ons:

  • Pantheon Search is a Solr-based system for indexing and searching site content. Pantheon provides Apache Solr v3.6 as a service for most plans including the Sandbox site plan.
  • Object Cache is a Redis-based open-source, networked, in-memory, key-value data store that can be used as a drop-in caching backend for your Drupal or WordPress website.

To enable or disable add-ons:

  1. Go to the Site Dashboard.

  2. Click Settings, and then click Add Ons. You will see all the available add-ons for your site.

  3. Click Add or Remove for each add-on you wish to enable or disable.

Add-ons and the Basic Plan

Pantheon Search and Object Cache are available to Sandbox plans for testing. Pantheon Search and Object Cache are available to Performance Small plans and higher for production sites. If either feature is enabled on your site, the feature will stop functioning and may cause errors if the site is moved to a Basic plan.

Sandbox Sites

Sandbox sites are useful for trying out the Pantheon platform, creating sandboxes for development, or for starting a new client project. Pantheon allocates two Sandbox sites for all user accounts. If you've reached your limit of Sandbox sites, delete an unused site, take a site live, or join an organization. If you're building sites for third parties, join the Pantheon Partner Program for more Sandbox sites, Multidev environments, and other features. If you're at an educational institution, sign up for Pantheon for EDU.

To downgrade to Sandbox, see Cancel Current Plan.

Change Your Plan

Only Site Administrators or Site Owners can change site plans.

 Warning

Before making any changes, please review Before You Make Changes.

To change your plan:

  1. Go to the Site Dashboard, click Upgrade next to the site's name. Otherwise, click the current plan tag next to the site's name.

  2. Click Select below the plan you choose, and select the Plan Size if it's a Performance plan.

  3. Review the new plan on the Confirm Purchase page, and click Place Your Order.

Because billing is handled by the organization, the plan change is immediate, and you'll be returned to the Site Dashboard.

If the site plan isn't shown on the Dashboard immediately, refresh the page or click the Workflows button for status.

  1. Go to the Site Dashboard.

  2. For Sandbox sites, click Upgrade next to the site's name. Otherwise, click the current plan tag next to the site's name.

Cancel Your Plan

 Warning

Before making any changes, please review Before You Make Changes.

  1. Go to the Site Dashboard.

  2. Select the current plan (to the right of the site name).

  3. Click the Downgrade to free link to cancel the current plan.

  4. Check Yes, cancel my plan, then click Continue.

  5. Make sure the change details are correct, then click Submit.

  6. Remove the existing card as a payment method for the site. Refer to Billing in the Site Dashboard for more information.

Optionally, you can remove the Sandbox site after downgrading. Refer to Deleting a Site on Pantheon for more information.

 Note

For any site plan downgrades, no refunds or prorated credits will be issued as per our Terms of Service.