There are a lot of good Drupal hosting sites out there. But Pantheon stands out because it offers FREE hosting. Are there caveats? sure, but that is to be expected. The two biggest are ads on your site and a domain name under their root.
Right now, I have a client who is sitting on the fence about a new site. I have a somewhat vested interest in his success so my plan is to develop a site first and then sell it to him. Now this is a weird use case sure. But it wouldn’t be possible without Pantheon’s offer of free hosting. And my client can choose a payment plan down the road with his own URL and no ads once he commits.
Pantheon offers some really cool features too. Either SFTP or Git access, Drupal distributions and a really easy install requiring nothing more than some mouse clicks.
They also offer a cool multistage dev/test/live environment that really allows you to develop safely in a multideveloper environment. Add Git to the equation and you have a distributed local environment with version control.
The first site that I am doing is called Landetech. So the urls from Pantheon are:
dev-landetech.gotpantheon.com
test-landetech.gotpantheon.com
live-landetech.gotpantheon.com
With the Pantheon control panel, you have clear and concise control over changes committed to each environment. Very cool stuff.
Pantheon also uses Varnish for caching for greatly improved performance, something that Drupal usually needs. Check them out.
landie.tech 