IN G

S T
H O D
D EA
IS

A Prescriptive Guide
to Revitalizing Your Website
Table of Contents

RIP Website Hosting 3

Bad Hosting Syndrome 4

How Traditional Hosting Falls Short 8

DIY Hosting Maintenance and Hidden Costs 10

Unleash the Power of Your Website Without Server Headaches 11

How Pantheon Stacks Up 12

Additional Pantheon Features 13

 HOSTING IS DEAD

RIP Website Hosting

The end is near for traditional website hosting. Much like software as a service (SaaS) is
responsible for the demise of traditional enterprise software, digital experience platforms
are putting an end to website hosting and the unnecessary hassles that made seemingly
simple tasks a slog.

Website owners: this means you can get out of the business of managing software
updates, configuring networking, hardware, and security. You are free to innovate and
iterate on the web on your own terms, focusing on creative designs, great copy, and killer
user experiences.

Your developers are free to work on new features and performance enhancements. Now
is the time to innovate and fine tune your online message. If you are spending even a
moment on underlying hardware or infrastructure software, you are wasting time and
money. Don’t get left behind!

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 HOSTING IS DEAD

Bad Hosting Syndrome

Powering your own websites means that, in addition to your regular marketing programs, you are
carrying “the pager” when network and hardware issues occur. This also means you are the decision
maker when it comes to the tools that build and run your digital experiences. As a marketer, is this
where you want to spend your time? If you are doing it on your own, do you have any of these
symptoms?

CHECK ALL THAT APPLY:

Fragile-Site-O-Phobia

Symptoms: Saying things like “The site must never, ever, change!” or “We don’t update our sites,
or they will break.”

Prognosis: When your team is afraid of breaking the site because there’s no reliable way to test
and deploy changes, your site is no longer a marketing tool; it’s a burden.

Remedy: Use a platform that allows for agile marketing, automated testing, and maximizing the
Drupal and WordPress content management functionality.

4
Content Paralysis

Symptoms: Saying things like “We can’t update the website this week because the developers
are working on new features,” or “We can’t make any changes after 3:00pm because Grumpy Joe
from IT wants the site locked down before releasing updates.”

Prognosis: When the marketing team is not able to release content updates while developers
are working on new features, your team works at a snail’s pace spending more time coordinating
website releases than making the site better.

Remedy: Use a website operations platform that allows marketers to publish content on demand
while providing developers the tools needed to push new features weekly (all while keeping
content synchronized between dev, test, and live).

Slow -Page-Load Panic Attacks

Symptoms: Saying things like “Maybe the office internet is just slow, boss,” or “I’m not sure if our
site loads fast in Europe or Asia.”

Prognosis: Research shows that users have little patience for sites that take longer than one
second to load. In fact, most customers surveyed will not repurchase from a site exhibiting slow or
otherwise poor performance. If return visits are valuable, page load time matters.

Remedy: Choose a platform with built-in performance and monitoring tools, so your site runs
blazingly fast from everywhere in the world and performance issues are easy to troubleshoot.

5
Ever-Present Viruses

Symptoms: Saying things like “Since I became marketing manager, I have become an expert on
bots and malware;” “Who do I call to get HTTPS certificates added to my site and how does this
stuff work?” or “It looks like the phone calls are coming—from inside my website—How is that
even possible?!”

Prognosis: The internet is rife with malicious actors and tactics: server breaches, phishing,
and bot attacks. Even if your website doesn’t contain private information, getting hacked hurts
your reputation.

Remedy: Use platform-wide security and access controls, configured and monitored by experts.

Fear of (Social Media) Success

Symptoms: Saying things like “I sure hope that amazing feature about our company doesn’t take
down the site,” or “I’m a marketer, but I also know every single web error code, because I have
seen them all on my site.”

Prognosis: Blog posts going viral should be an opportunity, not a downtime disaster. Social media
should be a marketer’s friend, not a source of anxiety. When traffic comes unexpectedly, your
website needs to handle the load.

Remedy: Use best-in-breed tools, preferably pre-configured to make scaling simple.

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 Site Abandonment Guilt

Symptoms: Saying things like “Website? We built one a few years ago, if I recall. What about it?”
or “We just use Squarespace/Facebook as our web presence, because my website destroyed my
ability to create and keep up with my peers.”

Prognosis: Web design evolves daily, and new technologies allow companies and clients to
interact in new ways every day. Creating rich experiences depends on your team being able to
push the envelope and try new ways to make your company stand out. If you aren’t adding new
features and content constantly, it’s time to assess your tools or your process.

Remedy: Use a platform that improves the workflow, maintains guardrails, and enables both
beginner and advanced developers to work quickly and safely.

Apigee Centrally Manages Hundreds of Sites on Pantheon

Apigee enables companies to connect with their customers,

“Our involvement with
PMS 1655 PMS 425
partners, and employees via their API as a service. They
Pantheon started as a fire
maintain a core codebase on Pantheon, which they can
drill. Now we are investing
update and push to each client’s portal. Customers are
for the future. ”
always running the latest code and Apigee isn’t buried in
Harsh Chevuru, Engineering bespoke, customized web solutions.
Leader, Apigee

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 HOSTING IS DEAD

How Traditional Hosting Falls Short

Marketing teams know that their website is not just an online billboard; it’s the canonical
message for all other marketing channels and campaigns. Hosting shouldn’t just be a separate
technical project. It should add value and streamline your editorial workflow. Here are the
common hosting options:

1 Virtual Private Servers (Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean)

While VMs afford flexibility and cost savings for less resource-heavy uses like dev environments,
they carry all the maintenance responsibilities of dedicated servers—monitoring, failover, and
updates are up to your team.

2 Self-Hosting
When your company has a great internal sysadmin—and hardware to spare—why not, right? But
today, running websites and running an internal network are two different animals. To do it right,
your internal IT team needs to master not only your web technology, but also the configuration
necessary to support your CMS and your dev team. This includes Git, Varnish, Redis, and
deployment best practices.

3 Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is cheap and...well, it’s cheap. It’s also unreliable and underpowered for most professional
use cases. These servers also lack most modern developer tools and aren’t configured for CMS success.
It’s hard to make a case for shared hosting for a site of any value.

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 4 Managed Cloud Hosting (WPEngine, Siteground, Acquia)
Managed cloud provides redundancy and often includes some workflow tools for deployment, but
you still scale by adding machines to a cluster, and frequently the configuration for development is not
precisely the same as live. Because many of these services require building bespoke clusters for every
client, they are cost-intensive and the full architecture can’t affordably be mirrored in development and
test environments.

Hardware Isn’t the Whole Story

A qualified sysadmin with Drupal and WordPress expertise is one of the most difficult roles to find and fill in the
tech industry. Moreover, the cost is prohibitive, even for many large companies. Support quality and speed are
just as important to consider with managed hosting options. Be sure to vet the human side to your provider, not
just CPUs and RAM.

Human Rights Watch Trusts Pantheon to Handle Traffic Spikes

Tired of spending valuable hours maintaining servers, Senior

Digital Drupal Engineer Mihai Cuibus wanted a solution that could
“Pantheon provides us liberate his team from micromanaging infrastructure while also
peace of mind that the
providing peace of mind during frequent (often downtime causing)
site would stay up during
[frequent traffic spikes],
traffic spikes. He turned to Pantheon for its smooth scaling, built-in
while also freeing up our workflow, and its support of both Drupal and WordPress.
team to do more work.
We found great support
from Pantheon—both the
product and the team.”

Mihai Cuibus, Senior Digital

Engineer

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 HOSTING IS DEAD

DIY Hosting Maintenance and Hidden Costs

The right questions can help you and your team cut through the noise. Here are 3 queries to
consider as you evaluate DIY hosting options:

How will we manage development and deployments?

Why it matters: A separate development and testing environment provides a safe place to develop and try new
site features without interfering with your live site. The alternative is to make changes directly to your live site,
which leads to bugs and downtime. A safe deployment workflow is also key, ensuring painless site launches and
feature releases.

Who will handle server configuration and updates: setting up the OS, web server, and caching?
Why it matters: Visitors give up when pages load slowly or your site goes down resulting in lost leads, sales, etc.
Hosting environments need to be set up properly and caching systems configured to withstand traffic spikes.

Who is responsible when issues happen?

Why it matters: What happens when your site goes down at 3:00AM? If rebooting the server doesn’t fix it, who
does? Someone on your IT team needs to carry the pager and respond to incidents 24/7.

Patch Pushes Features Constantly - Even with 2 Milliion Daily Pageviews

“We’ve got to innovate Maintaining a custom AWS stack was costly and the time required
like crazy. We need to manage it often kept the Patch dev team from from innovating
to be able run stuff at breakneck speed. Now they publish 800-1,000 stories a day with
up, have ideas crash
help from Pantheon’s digital experience platform.
and burn, and have
infrastructure that can
support us.”

CTO Abraham Brewster

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 HOSTING IS DEAD

Unleash the Power of Your Website

Without Server Headaches
Founded in 2010, Pantheon is the preferred digital experience platform for marketing teams,
developers, and digital agencies. For thousands of users, powering over 200,000 websites,
Pantheon eases the burden of managing high-performance websites, without incurring
additional costs in system administration. Here’s a simple breakdown of how we make your
team’s lives easier and your marketing faster and more agile:

Responsibilities DIY DevOps Pantheon

Content & Design YOU YOU

Team Management YOU

Dev Tools, Environments,

YOU
& Workflow

Traffic Spikes/Scaling YOU

Monitoring & Performance YOU

Infrastructure Security YOU

Server Configuration YOU

YOU You and your team do all of the setup, maintenance, monitoring, and security
configurations for the entire stack; leaving less time to make your website great.

By freeing you from hosting considerations, Pantheon helps you focus on finding new and innovative ways
to get your message out. We have shown thousands of marketing teams that, when unhindered by hardware
and infrastructure limitations, they are able to push the limits of what they can do. With a powerful CMS and
Pantheon, content and design become your focus. And your marketing campaigns can become exponentially
more inventive and creative.

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 HOSTING IS DEAD

How Pantheon Stacks Up

As you can see by the previous chart, DIY hosting probably doesn’t sound like such a great
option. However, even managed hosting lacks the features which make Pantheon a preferred
choice for creative and agile marketing teams. Often, the features you expect as a given must
be configured and managed by your team, often for considerable time and cost:

Managed
Features Self-Hosting EC-2 Pantheon
Hosting

Manual/ Manual/
Add New WP/Drupal Sites Manual One Button
Automated Automated

Included with
Managing Dev/Test/Live Manual Manual Manual
Every Site

Manage CMS Updates Manual Manual Manual Automated

HTTPS Manual Manual Manual Included

High Performance Stack Manual Manual Manual Configured

CMS Support No No Depends Yes

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 HOSTING IS DEAD

Additional Pantheon Features

Whether you are a business, agency, or in higher education, Pantheon has a track record of
success in helping teams be more agile. If you are considering a different hosting service, make
sure they have the features needed to make your team more successful.

With Pantheon:

 Start new projects on the fly; go live in minutes.

 Enjoy the fastest platform in the world, benefitting end-user experience as well as SEO rankings.

 Get onto the platform and up-to-speed with zero interruption with our elite onboarding, migration
services, and a dedicated customer success manager.

 Provide your team with a development environment they love.

Improve the Health of Your Website

Contact our experts for prescriptive advice, best practices, and industry knowledge to make
your website perform better than ever: 855-927-9378.

You can trust us, these brands do:

UNITED
NATIONS

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