Cheap hosting is like a van on fire in your kitchen

Budget hosting options often cut corners to get you that sweet price. When those compromises affect performance, stability, and security, any savings you were hoping for will go up in smoke quickly.

At SeaMonster Studios, we build websites with best-practice workflows on Pantheon. The Pantheon platform lets us spin up development and testing environments quickly, meaning you get to see the site as it’s built, compare updates using advanced version control tracking, and save you from wasting billable hours waiting on the platform.

Here’s why you should keep it there.

With your site built, we need to host it somewhere — give it a home so to speak. Our Pantheon environment ensures your website will continue to perform at high speeds, with minimal need for support. No one visiting your site wants slow page loads or compromised performance, including search engines responsible for returning your site when folks are looking for you. The platform automatically does much of the work required to keep professional-grade WordPress sites fast, secure, and scalable.

Here’s why we recommend clients host their sites with Pantheon:

At $10 a month, cheaper hosting may seem like a bargain, but these plans are not designed to keep your WordPress sites consistently secure, fast, and up-to-date. To keep costs down, these plans trim away development and testing environments, reliable automated backups, and make it challenging for developers to collaborate securely. Without these sorts of features, your developer will spend more time ($$) dealing with workarounds and jury-rigged solutions. In many cases, the true costs of cheap hosting can add up to thousands of dollars a year for ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting. With Pantheon, we eliminate all of those hidden costs.

Every dollar you spend on web development should contribute to the growth of your business. Using an open-source CMS like WordPress brings you closer to that goal, as our developers don’t need to start from scratch. However, they’ll still be wrapped up in system administration. The Pantheon platform allows you to funnel 100% of your web investment directly to the high-value features and strategy that grow your business, instead of spending time ($$) maintaining, backing up, and protecting your website.

Your business performance depends on your website performance. For every second visitors wait, conversions drop 7 percent. Pantheon is tuned to deliver the fastest performance possible. Third-parties like Loadstorm rate Pantheon as #1 in performance and reliability. The platform is so ridiculously fast that sites migrating from generic hosting see dramatic speed boosts instantly. But, you wont even have to take our word for it.

Security needs to be a priority for your site; losing access or compromising other assets can impact your entire business. Pantheon makes continuous platform-wide upgrades so you don’t need to ask a developer about Heartbleed, Internet Doomsday, or other risks du jour. Pantheon also enables your developers to quickly update your site in one click. For sites built with security best-practices, like the ones we build every day at SeaMonster Studios, Pantheon has a perfect no-hack record. Read more about Pantheon Security.