Pantheon vs. Rackspace Managed Hosting

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Pantheon
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Pantheon is a WebOps platform where marketers and developers collaborate to drive results. The vendor states that with Pantheon, site owners maximize their capacity to update website design and functionality, responding to market trends, catering to consumer behavior, and adding real value to the business's bottom line. Today, companies compete on the basis of digital experiences, and the best results emerge from an agile build-test-learn process. Whether it's publishing content,…
$29
per month
Rackspace Managed Hosting
Score 1.0 out of 10
N/A
Rackspace Managed Hosting is cloud computing company Rackspace's managed IT services and IaaS offering. Its infrastructure options include bare metal servers, virtual single-shared servers, and cloud multi-tenant environments.
$23
per month
Pricing
PantheonRackspace Managed Hosting
Editions & Modules
Basic
$29
per month
Performance
$114
per month
Elite
Contact for quote
Linux
$23.00
per month
Windows
$75.00
per month
Windows + SQL
$128.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PantheonRackspace Managed Hosting
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PantheonRackspace Managed Hosting
Considered Both Products
Pantheon
Chose Pantheon
The differentiating advantage that Pantheon has is the incredibly intuitive workflow UI, with seamless GIT integrations between each environment: Dev, Test, and Live.
Chose Pantheon
A lot of times, we'll inherit existing environments from client projects and will work with them to not disrupt anything. What I like about Pantheon is that it's a fairly simple setup with a lot of power behind it. It can save hours of setup and admin, and is reliable enough …
Rackspace Managed Hosting

No answer on this topic

Best Alternatives
PantheonRackspace Managed Hosting
Small Businesses
ManageWP
ManageWP
Score 10.0 out of 10
SiteGround
SiteGround
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Score 8.5 out of 10
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Score 8.5 out of 10
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PantheonRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
2.2
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.8
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
PantheonRackspace Managed Hosting
Likelihood to Recommend
Great Cloud-based coordination platform which offers the team excellent capabilities on easy workflow management, multiple project activity tracking and easy to monitor all the project assets from one desk. Pantheon offers the best content management tools, strategic on development project life cycle management is excellent and the reporting features with Pantheon are effective and useful real-time data analytical capability.
Read full review
I would choose zero, but it's not an option. In my opinion, STAY away from this company. Problems can occur, but responsiveness should occur when problems do. In my experience, I've been on hold for more than 9 hours, waiting for promised callbacks for more than 30 hours, and don't have any hope for a near-term resolution.
Read full review
Pros
  • Effective use of our codebase deployment and implementation.
  • The dashboard functionality and general stability and security are excellent.
  • The server is quite consistent, and if you need assistance from the support team, they are very quick to respond.
  • Automatic updates let me ensure that my customers have safe websites without increasing my own expense.
  • The team offers excellent assistance and help for chat.
Read full review
  • Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone.
  • Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform.
Read full review
Cons
  • Pricing structure has too large of a jump between Basic and Performance plans
  • Have run into issues with prescribed WP updates not working through dashboard and having to do manually.
  • Pantheon site dashboard occasionally is unavailable (the site is never affected though)
Read full review
  • Pricing is competitive, but other providers do beat them out with some of their pricing "features".
  • The Cloud Files offering is relatively slow and wasn't usable for us.
  • The automated backup feature that is offered for the Cloud Servers is pretty limited and wasn't usable for us.
  • There are 2-3 different web management panels, with different logins. It's hard to keep track of which one is which, and can be frustrating/confusing when trying to log in to your panel and choosing the wrong one.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
The environment is stable and we have not had any issues/downtime. The annual cost is reasonable.
Read full review
If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!
Read full review
Usability
Monitoring of project development is very easy using a dashboard with its integration capability, showing all processes in a single screen which is easy to use and also easy to navigate through. A powerful tool that allows testing to be carried on without the user noticing any changes to the system and a highly interactive tool for groups and project members.
Read full review
The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability
Read full review
Support Rating
Even tier 1 Pantheon chat and ticket support are knowledgeable, competent, and useful. They routinely understand and promptly resolve urgent, complex, and/or unusual issues that other hosts need to escalate to tier 2 or tier 3 support personnel. I honestly can't think of a truly negative or disappointing support experience in the years I've used Pantheon hosting for client websites.
Read full review
In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Once the environments were up and running, the implementation was easy to synchronize with latest data prior to switchover.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Acquia was terrible. We use DigitalOcean for some all-purpose computing needs and Platform.sh for an application that does more computing and high-throughput processing where we do not want page views (API calls) to count against our usage.
Read full review
Rackspace is a premier IaaS company with vast resources and an excellent reputation for reliability and support. We have used AWS and Rackspace extensively over the last 10 years, while trying other providers for smaller, less mission critical, requirements. Rackspace has been solid throughout that time, experiencing very little unplanned downtime. During their planned maintenance windows, they were incredibly responsive and helpful in coming up with solutions to deal with the scheduled downtime so as to minimize, or eliminate, the downtime experienced by our customers. We originally started working with Rackspace due to a major outage in the AWS platform, which opened our eyes to needing to diversify where our servers are located so as to reduce the risk on a single point of failure with any single provider. Compared to Linode and Digital Ocean, specifically, Rackspace's offering is much more robust. While those other companies do have a good offering, they did not provide cloud servers with enough resources for our needs (MySQL databases with fast solid state disks, and large amounts of memory available). We did host many machines with Joyent for a time, however, they were very focused on the SuSe operating system, which we wanted to move away from due to it's waning community support and relatively esoteric package management system. Ultimately, Amazon and Rackspace were our two providers for hosting our infrastructure, consisting of several (4-10) application servers, database servers (typically 1 MySQL master with multiple slaves for reporting, backups, and failover), and micro-service host machines.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Pantheon allows ordinary sites to excel esp if there is consistent development going on behind the scenes.
  • Website management is super easy and the hosting fee gets paid off as you save on developer hours.
  • Expensive for those who are not consistently developing on the platform, there are other options out there at better price points.
Read full review
  • We've found it helpful to host our own web sites on their cloud servers, which is a positive.
  • We've also hosted our Nagios instance on a low-end cloud server, which is also a positive.
  • A negative impact is that they've now decided to start charging for their support.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Pantheon Screenshots

Screenshot of Find out in seconds if your site is ready to launch. Use Launch Check to get recommendations and discover site issues fast with our report based on over 50 automated checks.Screenshot of Our Developer Dashboard has everything you need to build, launch, and run Drupal and WordPress sites. Interface via SFTP or Git, deploy and scale your sites, and access tools like backups and one-click core updates. Easily add team members and control access.