The WP Valet team loves building strong relationships in the community. It’s exciting to grow and work with new people. This month, we’re very happy to announce that Pantheon—a WordPress and Drupal hosting company—is now working with WP Valet as partner.
To get things off to a smooth start, our team took a trip out to San Francisco to get better acquainted with the folks at Pantheon. When we walked into the room on day one, we kicked off with their CEO Zack; Kit, who led helping us form a process to migrate all of our sites; Greg, their open-source contributor; and Dwayne, who’s managing our relationship with Pantheon. They asked us a ton of questions how about who our clients are, how we work, and what our problems really are. It was pretty clear that they are super interested in helping us solve some of our challenges.
Things We Love About Pantheon
The Pantheon Workflow is what we love most about Pantheon. It’s a flow that translates pretty well to ours at WP Valet. However, our workflow is fairly tedious to set up, and it’s difficult for us to move quickly on new or urgent projects.
The Pantheon workflow is opinionated, polished, and well thought out. On top of that, Pantheon has an incredible amount of documentation and guides. We also try to keep up our own knowledge base and documentation, but knowing that Pantheon has a lot of what we are creating already is very attractive. Their documentation is also all open source.
Pantheon took the time to explain to us where traditional, managed, and newer hosts have failed and how they plan to not follow the same path. They outlined their architecture in much detail and explained clearly how their platform scales, allowing them to meet some very high demands. Our time together left our team feeling pretty confident.
WordPress multisite is something we want to provide on Pantheon, and while they aren’t completely there yet, they sat down with us and very transparently showed us exactly where they are currently and gave us clear expectations for how they will be supporting it in the future. It was interesting to hear how Drupal multisite compared to WordPress multisite and where Pantheon currently stands.
Some other things that we love about Pantheon and our trip there:
- We mentioned how it’s sometimes difficult to keep our existing workflow in place and introduce new things that could help us—Greg’s response was those are challenges Pantheon should solve for us, which was very refreshing.
- While out for dinner, one Pantheon “on-call” team member mentioned she’d love to use Terminal from her phone to help customers solve issues when she’s not in the office—impressive.
- Pantheon is very interested in helping their customers integrate things like Single Sign On and Continuous Integration tools.
- Drupal and WordPress can really have a positive influence on each other. Experiencing some of Pantheon’s knowledge the Drupal way has definitely left us with some thoughts that can influence the WordPress way.
- While we don’t have shell access, their CLI tool is incredibly useful, and they are working hard to make it better.
- We found Pantheon to be a devoted staff, and from a tech perspective, savvy and highly motivated.
Working as Partners
During our week together, we talked about expectations for skill sets and expectations for our respective roles. This type of communication lays the groundwork for a smooth transition process, and ultimately better customer experiences for all of our clients.
We also appreciate how the Pantheon team took the time to delve into our opinions on multisite. Zack, the CEO, spent a lot of time asking us questions. He asked us technical questions that show intelligence and true understanding of where WordPress companies are coming from. The Pantheon team is really interested to see what our unique problems are, and what brought us to explore using them as a partner.
On a side note, we also found time to enjoy a little San Francisco fun. This included a Chinese bar where we heard a Led Zeppelin song with a Chinese voice over. It was all nuts and a lot of fun.
Overall, we felt incredibly welcomed by Pantheon, and we’re excited to embark on working with them as one of our preferred partners.