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Last Reviewed: September 19, 2022

Introduction

Learn about and understand traffic overages.


The number of unique visits displayed in Pantheon’s Site Dashboard determines the traffic Pantheon will apply for evaluating use on your site under your pricing plan.

Traffic Limits and Overages

Pantheon optimizes the resources and performance of your site based on your choice of pricing plan. Your pricing plan determines the backend resources Pantheon deploys to support site performance and to serve the corresponding traffic levels for each plan. Customers should choose the plan that suits their anticipated traffic and continually monitor that choice using Pantheon's Site Dashboard.

As your site grows on Pantheon, you can modify your plan based on the metrics you find in the Site Dashboard. If your traffic is continually over your plan limit, we may automatically adjust you to a pricing plan that better aligns with your traffic growth. This is important to ensure the continued performance of all sites on Pantheon, and to avoid any negative impact to your site as traffic levels change.

Pantheon monitors your site traffic as part of our evaluation of overall site health. To understand the limits associated with your pricing plan, visit the pricing comparison page for additional information.

Overage Protection

Pantheon designed Overage Protection for Performance sites to prevent one-time traffic spikes from causing billing issues. All Performance plans and higher include Overage Protection, which provides billing protection against externally driven spikes, or for businesses that have an annual “big event” but otherwise operate at a lower “normal” rate.

If the change to traffic behavior exceeds your plan limit for any two months of traffic, your site will be moved to the next appropriate plan to help avoid further overages. You will receive notifications of this change in an email with a subject of "You've been right-sized" ahead of time.

Info:
Note

Basic Sites do not have overage protection. If a Basic Site exceeds the 25,000 visit cap in any given month, the site plan will be automatically upgraded to the Performance plan whose visit limit accommodates the site's traffic.