March 28, 2024
What is changing?
Great news! Pantheon is simplifying the way we calculate and apply site visit overages. This change will help reduce excess billing and unplanned costs should a site exceed its plan limits.
This change is effective for site visits on or after January 1, 2024. In order to transition to the new overages model and allow you, the customer, to digest this change Pantheon will not run an overages process in February 2024. This new program will be formally launched in March 2024 and the initial month’s processing will encompass usage from January and February of 2024.
The new overage charge policy
Effective for usage starting on January 1, 2024, overages will be billed $40 for each 10,000 unique site visits (a unique site visit is defined as a specific IP address and user agent combination over a 24-hour period) or portion thereof that exceeds the amount of included unique visits in the subscription. This applies uniformly to all sites running on the platform at all subscription levels.
In addition, with Overage Protection, all Pantheon customers, except for Basic plans and monthly subscriptions, will have one month of overages waived every 12 months during the subscription term. For simplicity, the 12-month period will follow a calendar year running from January through December. This Overage Protection will be applied automatically on the first month of each plan year where your site is over the included unique visits in the subscription- you do not have to do a thing.
Lastly, for new customers coming onto the platform for the first time there will be a three-month grace period starting with your service start date (the day a site is first moved from a Sandbox to a commercial plan) where no overages will be incurred. This allows you the time to get calibrated on the platform and focus on what is most important: the successful launch of your web site(s) on Pantheon!
The prior overage charge policy
Prior to this change, if a site exceeded the unique site visits included in the subscription plan, the plan would be automatically upgraded to a higher plan level that was a better fit for the amount of unique site visits. Many times that increase would result in a surprise to customers, who hadn’t budgeted for increasing the plan for the remainder of the subscription term, and the cost would be more than what customers thought was fair. We listened, and we’re making this change to make Pantheon a brand you trust even more.
Will you show me an example of how this works?
Example scenario
Assume you purchase an annual Performance Small plan that includes 25,000 unique monthly site visits starting October 1st. The cost of a Performance Small plan is $160 per month (paid annually). Note that the next plan level up is a Performance Medium plan that includes 50,000 unique monthly site visits is $275 per month (paid annually).
During the holiday season, you have 40,000 unique site visits in November and 45,000 in December, before returning to less than 25,000 monthly unique site visits during the rest of your contract term (Jan-Sep).
Overage fee under the new policy
Under the new policy, you will simply pay a one-time fee of:
$ 0 for November’s extra 15,000 visits because Overage Protection allows 1
free month of overages, and
$ 80 for December’s extra 20,000 visits.
Overage fee under the old policy
Because you exceeded the plan limits of 25,000 for two consecutive months, under the old policy your plan would have been automatically upgraded to the Performance Medium plan starting in December. This would have increased your monthly cost from $160 to $275 a month, or an additional $115 per month. Since the plan change occurred in December and you still had 9 months remaining on your term, this increase would have cost $1,035 extra, which would be charged to your credit card in January or you would have received an additional invoice for plans on contract.
Comparison of the new vs. old overage fee
As you can see in this example, the new overage fee is a total of $80 vs. the cost for the upgraded plan under the prior policy would have increased your cost $1,035 –- the new policy saves you 92%!
Updated documentation
We've updated our Overage Policy documentation to align with the new policy and provide more specifics, such as additional benefits for new site launches and qualifying nonprofit organizations.
January 25, 2024
As we embark on a new year, we're excited to unveil a transformation. This January marks the introduction of Pantheon release notes, a rebranding of our changelog. Our aim is to elevate your platform experience by providing even more valuable insights into product updates.
What's new?
- Enhanced visibility: Discover our improved interface with added tags to each release note, indicating their category and whether action is required. This feature ensures quick insights at a glance, making your navigation smoother.
- Filter functionality: Explore the convenience of our newly integrated filter functionality, allowing you to tailor your release note view based on specific tags. This feature ensures you get information that's most relevant to you.
What’s coming up?
Get ready for a streamlined and more dynamic experience with Pantheon release notes. We're committed to keeping you in the loop every step of the way, ensuring you stay informed about the latest.
- Frequent updates: Say goodbye to waiting for a monthly summary. We're shifting from the monthly retrospective model to publishing a release note for each significant update, providing you with real-time information.
- Proactive communication: This change supports more proactive communication. Now, any noteworthy change will be marked here, complementing other channels like blog posts and emails.
What lies ahead?
This is just the beginning! Stay tuned for more enhancements down the road as we continue to refine and elevate your Pantheon experience.
We appreciate your continued support and look forward to a year filled with collaborative success.
October 1, 2023
We're excited to announce that our documentation site has been seamlessly integrated with our brand-new design system. This enhancement brings a fresh and cohesive look to our documentation, providing a unified and visually appealing experience for our users. Explore the updated, improved, and more accessible Docs site today.
February 1, 2023
Pantheon Learning is now available. Use Pantheon Learning to learn about the Pantheon platform through self-paced courses and virtual instructor-led training. You can find courses on New Relic, Front-End Sites, Autopilot, and much more in our training hub.
February 1, 2023
Pantheon documentation now has a new location. Go to docs.pantheon.io for information on all Pantheon products and features. The Pantheon docs site is deployed using Front-End Sites, with redirects from pantheon.io behind AGCDN. Ensure you check out our much quicker and improved docs site.
November 1, 2022
Account Management Guide - Learn how to set up teams, use dashboards, and how billing works. Develop an organization plan and administer your Pantheon platform with our account management documentation.
Log Files on Pantheon - Log files track and record your site's activity to help you find, debug, and isolate current or potential problems on your site. Each environment has individual log files which can be obtained using SFTP. Additionally, application-level logs can be accessed directly through Drupal. For more information on using log files and for answers to frequently asked questions about log files, check out our documentation.
October 1, 2022
Quicksilver on Pantheon - Documentation on Quicksilver is now available in an accessible guide. Quicksilver hooks into platform workflows to automate your Pantheon WebOps workflow. This allows the platform to run selected scripts automatically every hour, or when a team member triggers the corresponding workflow.
August 1, 2022
Autopilot Pre-Configuration Checklist - There are a few things you should know before you enable Autopilot. Use this guide to ensure your current site configuration is compatible with Autopilot. For more information on Autopilot, refer to the documentation.
Pantheon Decoupled - Pantheon Decoupled is available for Early Access participants. Pantheon Decoupled provides users with tools that improve the experience of building a decoupled front-end that sources data from a CMS back-end. With decoupled sites a CMS site can be linked to a single decoupled site or multiples sites, or the user does not need a CMS at all and can link directly to a front end application! Please check out how we can help you transition to a decoupled experience on the Pantheon platform.
Pantheon Global CDN - A guide for Pantheon's Global CDN is now available. Global CDN is a core platform offering that provides improved performance and security for customer sites. It supports caching to accelerate both static content and anonymous site pages. By serving data from cache servers all over the world, website visitors receive a response without having to wait.
Multidev Guide - Multidevs are development environments for teams. A Multidev environment allows a developer to fork the entire stack (code and content), work independently, and then merge the code changes back into the main site. Refer to this guide for detailed information using Pantheon's Multidev environment for your Drupal or WordPress site.
July 1, 2022
Autopilot for Custom Upstreams - Combining Autopilot with Custom Upstreams is an excellent way to reduce the time spent on maintaining multiple sites. Pantheon allows eligible customers to use Autopilot and Custom Upstreams to automate routine maintenance for upstream and downstream sites.
Fastly on Pantheon - Pantheon offers extensive content delivery network (CDN) features through our Global CDN and Advanced Global CDN. Pantheon also partners with Fastly if you prefer to use a CDN outside of the Pantheon platform. Using Fastly can be a good option if you are looking for log or media storage integration solutions.
Git on Pantheon Guide - A new guide on using Git on the Pantheon platform is now available. Pantheon provides industry standard version control with Git. Pantheon uses Git to make sure all code is stored, versioned, and deployed both safely and predictably.
WordPress REST API - The WordPress Edge Integrations plugin provides REST API endpoints for all of the major functions and output available via server-side PHP code. A full list and descriptions of all endpoints exists in the WordPress Edge Integrations SDK documentation. To learn more about the WordPress SDK, refer to the documentation.
June 1, 2022
Drupal 9 Migration Guides - The new Drupal 9 Migration Guides have been published. This is a major rework of the existing guide and provides greater assistance to users when choosing their upgrade path, creating separate guides for each path, or adding content for previously undocumented paths.
Using Solr 8 on Drupal 9 - Pantheon Search is now in General Availability. Pantheon Search is a system for indexing and searching site content. Pantheon Search with Solr 8 gives Drupal 9 web teams a high-performance search index integrated with Integrated Composer's one-click updates. Pantheon provides Solr-based search as a service for all environments. Currently, the default version of Solr on Pantheon is Apache Solr v3.6, but we recommend using Solr v8.
WordPress on Pantheon Quick Start Guide - This guide offers a comprehensive overview of WordPress on Pantheon. Use this guide to learn how to create a WordPress site on Pantheon or migrate an existing WordPress site. You can also learn about WordPress plugins, optimization, security, and content management.
WordPress with Composer on Pantheon - This new guide offers an overview of Composer-managed WordPress site capabilities on Pantheon. You can use this guide to create a new WordPress site that uses Composer, Continuous Integration, and Automated Testing. Additionally, you can learn how to create a new WordPress site that uses Integrated Composer.
May 1, 2022
Governance for WordPress Multisites - Multisite governance allows for increased efficiency for teams, by ensuring that roles and responsibilities are defined. For more information, refer to the documentation
Automate and Integrate your WebOps Workflow with Quicksilver - Hook into platform workflows to automate your Pantheon WebOps workflow and tell Pantheon which script you want to run. The platform will run the script automatically every time you or another team member triggers the corresponding workflow. You can use Terminus to install Quicksilver Composer scripts if you have a Composer-managed site. To learn more, refer to the documentation.
April 1, 2022
Cron for WordPress - Pantheon Cron now runs WP-Cron as an hourly task or on demand using WP-CLI with Terminus. Using the WP-CLI to run cron jobs on WordPress sites improves overall site performance and reduces the processing overhead for scheduling requests. To learn more about Pantheon Cron, refer to our documentation.
Edge Integrations - Pantheon leverages integration between the CMS and our Global CDN with Edge Computing capabilities to deliver the right content to the right audience directly, and with fewer moving parts. Edge Integrations is a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows users to personalize WordPress and Drupal on the Pantheon platform. For more information on Edge Integrations, refer to our documentation.
March 1, 2022
Convert an Empty Upstream Drupal Site to a Composer Managed Site - Convert an empty upstream Drupal 9 site to use Composer to manage deployments and dependencies. You can then switch from empty to the new Integrated Composer drupal-recommended upstream while remaining on Drupal 9. To convert, ensure your site has the Pantheon empty repository in its upstream. For more information, refer to our documentation.
Managing Drush Versions on Pantheon - Pantheon currently supports Drush versions 8, 10, and 11. For sites that are managed by Composer, a site-local installation of Drush is recommended. To learn about Pantheon's default Drush version, compatibility, requirements, and how to implement site-local usage, refer to our documentation.
February 1, 2022
Support Guide - Support details for Pantheon products and features are now available in a structured and detailed guide. You can learn about Pantheon’s Scope of Support, ways to contact Support, our Early Access program, and more. Refer to the documentation for more information.
January 1, 2022
Convert a Custom Upstream to Integrated Composer - Learn how to convert a non-Composer-managed Drupal 8 site to Integrated Composer while on Drupal 8. The process is similar to the Upgrade Pantheon Drupal 8 Sites to Drupal 9 With Integrated Composer guide, except that you will stay on Drupal 8 with some special considerations for Custom Upstreams, and can defer the Drupal 9 upgrade to later. Refer to the documentation for more information.
December 1, 2021
Personal Workspace Billing - Billing for Personal Workspaces in the New Dashboard is now more accessible. Users can add and manage subscription plans, change billing frequency, view the billing history for each renewal, and update payment information, all in one place. For more information on Billing in Personal Workspaces, refer to the documentation.
Multidev Access - To accelerate development and streamline maintenance, customers with Gold, Platinum, or Diamond accounts now have Multidev access automatically extended to contractors and agencies. For more information, refer to the Multidev FAQ documentation.
Support in the New Dashboard - Unified Support is now available in the New Dashboard. The Support tab in the New Dashboard simplifies the user experience for getting support on the Pantheon platform and offers users ease of access to the various support channels. Additionally, Diamond and Platinum Account customers can now call Pantheon's premium technical support line directly for any technical issues, escalations, site, billing, or overages queries. For more information, refer to the Support documentation.
November 1, 2021
Convert a Standard Drupal 8 Site to a Composer Managed Site - Upgrade a standard Drupal 8 site, by converting it to a Composer-managed Drupal 8 site on the new Integrated Composer framework. The documentation provides a guide for converting a standard Drupal 8 site using drops-8 to the new Integrated Composer drupal9 upstream while remaining on Drupal 8.
Using Solr 8 on Drupal 9 - Pantheon Search with Solr 8 is currently in Limited Availability. Pantheon Search derives from Apache Solr 8 and gives Drupal 9 web teams a high-performance search index integrated with Integrated Composer's easy one-click updates.
October 1, 2021
Autopilot - The Autopilot updater bot now scans a site’s homepage when initially enabled and automatically suggests 10 links that are important for VRT, allowing users to enable it for large site portfolios without having to manually create a test plan. You can also use the CMS update automation tool in the Dashboard to determine the estimated time your team has saved in Autopilot. For more information, refer to our Autopilot documentation.
Pantheon Global CDN - The Global CDN now offers Experience Protection to provide continuous and uninterrupted site uptime. If your site experiences issues, whether it’s an infrastructure problem or an application error, the Global CDN now delivers cached content to visitors instead of displaying an error message. For more information, refer to our Experience Protection documentation.
Terminus - The default branch name of the Terminus GitHub repository has changed from master to 2.x. This change only impacts individuals with a local clone of the Terminus repository, such as Terminus contributors or plugin developers. Update the local clone of the branch to 2.x as described in the GitHub documentation to avoid disruptions.
September 1, 2021
Autopilot - The Autopilot guide has been updated now that Autopilot is available for all users with Gold Accounts and higher.
Pantheon Disaster Recovery Playbook - Address and troubleshoot emergency downtime situations on the Pantheon platform. The guide focuses on the immediate actions a Pantheon customer should take in the event of a catastrophic site failure.
Using Solr 8 on Drupal 9 - Pantheon Search with Solr 8 is currently available as part of our Early Access program. Pantheon Search derives from Apache Solr v8.8 and gives Drupal 9 web teams a high-performance search index integrated with Integrated Composer's easy one-click updates.
August 1, 2021
Autopilot - Pantheon Autopilot has been released and is available to Gold, Platinum, and Diamond customers and partners. Check it out today by logging in and trying out the new Dashboard. Click Try the New Dashboard in the User or Organization Dashboard to access the new Dashboard; the option for a guided tour of the new Dashboard is provided upon logging in for the first time. Defaulting to either the existing or the new Dashboard can be managed through your personal settings. For more information please review Autopilot documentation.
Weekly Email Notifications for Autopilot - You can opt-in to receive an Autopilot weekly email digest which includes a summary of updates and activity on a site. To start receiving these emails, specify your preferences in the Personal Settings section of your new Dashboard.
April 1, 2021
Drupal 9 Migration Guide - Guided and manual migration steps to upgrade and migrate existing Drupal sites to Drupal 9 with Integrated Composer.
February 1, 2021
With the release of Terminus 2.5, the Pantheon Documentation team has updated the Terminus manual to include a refreshed End of Life timeline, changelog, and command reference page.
January 1, 2021
New: Debug Caching Issues - New troubleshooting guide to assist in resolving cache conflicts.
November 1, 2020
New: Autopilot - Automatically detect and apply new updates for your site’s core CMS, plugins, and themes in minutes with confidence.
New: Decoupled Sites - Our decoupled CMS approach empowers teams to accelerate collaboration and deliver results by uniting front and back-end developers on a single platform.
New: Inclusive Language Guide
October 1, 2020
Terminus Command Reference - Each command now has its own page with more detail and examples.
Across the Pantheon Documentation site, all headers are now anchor links, to make finding, sharing, and re-referencing Pantheon documentation easier.
July 1, 2020
Offers a concise reference for understanding site traffic and site plans.
Updates to both of these docs help clarify what Pantheon counts as site visits and pages served, and make Pantheon’s policies regarding overages more transparent.
Inclusive Language
As part of our commitment to more inclusive language, Pantheon recently switched to using blocklist/allowlist, and docs.pantheon.io has renamed its default Git branch to main.
Learn more about inclusive language at Google’s Writing inclusive documentation guide.
June 1, 2020
- Drupal 9 Early Access - Learn how to try out Drupal 9 on Pantheon now.
- Managed Updates - Confidently leverage open source, focus resources on growth, and secure your baseline with fully managed CMS updates.
- Onboarding Services - Pantheon Onboarding Managers are your WebOps experts, to help facilitate a successful launch.
May 1, 2020
Pantheon Documentation Site Improvements
Pantheon Documentation “404 Not Found” page now features built-in search and suggested docs, to help users find what they need more quickly.
Resources to Navigate COVID-19
To provide our customers, partners and the general public with a central resource to track our response to the developing COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve launched Resources to Navigate COVID-19. The page includes announcements, resources, details on what we’re doing, and an offer to organizations on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic.
April 1, 2020
Revised and updated instructions for multiple Drupal versions.
Expanded section on managing protected data.
New section created on removing sub-modules from your code base.
Revised and updated instructions on solutions for non-standard file paths.
March 1, 2020
Changelogs in the Docs
Want to see what’s new with Localdev, Build Tools, and Drush? Changelogs for these tools have been incorporated into Pantheon Documentation, for easy reference.
December 1, 2019
Learn how to set up Opensolr as a Solr search provider on Pantheon sites.
November 1, 2019
Learn how to set up Visual Studio Code to push your local development to Pantheon with Git or SFTP.
October 1, 2019
Learn how to use Lando for local WordPress development.
April 1, 2019
Andrew Taylor turned his Midwest PHP talk on Behat into a new guide on the installation and basic configuration of the automated testing tool.
This video series from Pantheon’s Developer Relations (now Developer Advocacy) Team is a condensed version of their popular training sessions.
March 1, 2019
This doc covers the important changes from this major release, some of which are not backwards-compatible.
Early access information for the new EU Region.
January 1, 2019
Learn about our newest service.
Learn how to add a client to your Partner Agency to share special features and Preferred Pricing.
Learn how to override DNS settings with your local hosts file.
December 1, 2018
This new page to the Terminus manual introduces readers to the concept of using Terminus in automated scripts to improve their workflow.
October 1, 2018
Learn about how annual billing can save you money.
August 1, 2018
Integrate your S3 Bucket with WordPress for media storage.
Take advantage of the ClamAV daemon on Pantheon for Drupal sites.
July 1, 2018
Learn the basics of DNS and some of the most common pain points.
Contract customers who need to retain custom TLS certificates now can.
For when you discover you need to move your existing Drupal 8 site to a Composer-managed workflow.
Get your commerce site spun up quickly on Pantheon. Written by Patrick Rauland.
This new service includes consulting, migrations, load testing, training, and dedicated customer success managers. Available to customers with Gold, Platinum, or Diamond support plans (now called Accounts).
May 1, 2018
Learn how to manage Drupal 8 using Composer with Pantheon.
April 1, 2018
Review considerations and recommendations on how to handle redirect logic via PHP within your site's configuration file.
Learn how to use the Views Cache Tags module along with custom code to control the Pantheon Advanced Page Cache.
Measure your site's traffic with the Metrics tool, found in the Live environment of the Site Dashboard.
View billing history (invoices and transactions) or edit credit card profiles to manage billing for sites in bulk within the Billing tab of the Account tool in the User Dashboard.
Add a new credit card, remove the current card or transfer billing to a new site owner within the Billing tab of the Settings tool in the Site Dashboard.
Information on how Pantheon measures site traffic.
January 1, 2018
Learn the basics of using WordPress or Drupal as a headless API backend.
Get your feet wet with Composer on WordPress or Drupal 7 before going all in.
December 1, 2017
Learn how to define default options for your Terminus commands.
This new guide describes using Composer to create a Drupal Commerce site.
This doc from Daniel Bachhuber explains how to use Google Apps to authenticate users on your WordPress site.
October 1, 2017
Learn how to use the WordPress dashboard, an SFTP client, and your text editor of choice to work quickly, safely and easily on Pantheon's Git-based platform.
June 1, 2015
This week we added WalkMe.com’s guidance platform. You can now search the docs from within the Dashboard and take tours to learn how to use the Pantheon platform.
April 1, 2015
New Articles
Learn how to use a quick PHP script to Convert MySQL tables from MyISAM to InnoDB.
Want the security of SSL on your Pantheon site but the budget won't allow it? Check out our new doc to learn how to set up and use Cloudflare SSL for free for your WordPress site.
New Guides
Our new guide will show you how to get up and running using a GitHub account to collaborate with your team. Learn how to synchronize your existing Pantheon site to GitHub, create repositories, synchronize existing GitHub repositories with Pantheon, and develop collaboratively by using branching and pull requests.
Two-factor authentication (TFA) is a security practice that prevents attackers from compromising accounts by requiring an extra authentication method beyond only using a password to log in. Our new guide will walk you through installing two-factor authentication on Drupal and WordPress, for both the single site and organization-wide cases.
March 1, 2015
New Guides
Check out our new guide Automated Testing for WordPress with Behat to learn how to set up Behat on your local machine and run automated tests against a remote WordPress site. Editors note: This was replaced with Automate Testing with Behat.
In our new guide Use Terminus to Create and Update Drupal Sites on Pantheon, you'll learn how to create a new Drupal site, install some contrib modules, commit code, and clone from one site environment to another—all through the Terminus CLI.
Feel more at home at the command line? Read our new guide to learn how to use Terminus and WP-CLI to create and manage a WordPress site.
February 1, 2015
New Articles
Need to make sure your website will perform under pressure? Load Testing with BlazeMeter shows you how to test your site using BlazeMeter.
Make sure the emails you send to customers never get marked as spam by using SendGrid. See Using SendGrid to Deliver Email to learn how to integrate this email delivery system into your site.
Worried about spamming users during Drupal debugging and testing? See our new guide to learn how to configure the Reroute Email module.
