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Rocket.net offers very impressive value for high-traffic wordpress sites and they use Cloudflare Enterprise. Their prices are significantly lower than most of the high-end managed wordpress hosts. Pantheon offers fast hosting, and a very solid staging workflow for complex websites, but it is often more expensive than most competitors.
Rocket.net is the best option for those that have high-traffic content sites that want to scale, as their pricing is far cheaper. Pantheon might be suitable if you have a much higher budget, with a lot of code deployments for mission-critical business applications, but it's not cheap.
Rocket.net and pantheon are very different hosts. Rocket.net offer much cheaper pricing for basic but high-traffic sites. They offload a lot of their processing to Cloudflare Enterprise, while Pantheon is a premium provider that's more useful for websites with customized code, integrations, and plugins.
Rocket.net vs Pantheon (2024) – WordPress Hosting Compared
Verdict - At a Glance
Rocket.net has one of the best pricing plans of any managed wordpress host online in 2023. They offer high-speed wordpress hosting which supports 1 million monthly visitors for just 60 dollars a month, which is pretty incredible. They have good support and overall their uptime has been very good. The one thing to keep in mind is that they have not been established for quite as long as many of their competitors, however, they are gaining popularity pretty fast.
I found Pantheon to be quite a fast host, however, their basic plan is relatively limited based on how much traffic it can handle and their performance plans get quite expensive . I found their staging workflow to be a bit overly complex for content websites that don't require many code updates.
Monthly Pricing Based on Number of Visitors
We always try to quote the monthly fee for each host not including discounts that might apply if you pay yearly. Rocket.net's very low prices actually renew at the same rate. Pantheon plan pricing renews at the same rate.
Prices listed below is the price of our recommended PLAN based on number of visitors for Rocket.net and Pantheon. Any time we have included figures in brackets accounts for overages. Sometimes it's cheaper to use a lower plan with overage fees if your host includes this in their pricing structure, but the performance of the lower plan might not be as strong.
Monthly Pricing Based on Number of Websites
The pricing below shows the closest PLAN based on the amount of websites at both Rocket.net and Pantheon. These plans will also include an allowance of disk space and visitors. Some hosting companies allow additional wordpress installs for an additional fee. This can sometimes work out as more affordable than using a higher plan, if it works out as more affordable then we will list these in brackets below
Remember, hosts often include discounts when you pay on a longer basis such as yearly or over multiple years, so make sure to check these offers out if applicable.
Monthly Pricing Based on Disk Space
This is pricing per gigabyte of disk space for both Rocket.net and Pantheon. As previously mentioned, if it works out as more affordable to use a cheaper plan and pay overages then we'll list that below in brackets.
Keep in mind that if you have a large amount of disk space usage for your site then you could alternatively host these externally using another service
($30 + 10GBs at $2/GB)
($30 + 30GBs at $2/GB)
Comparison Between Main Features
Other Features Compared
Hosting Speed
Some managed wordpress hosting companies have an SLA (service level agreement) where they commit to a certain percentage of uptime on a monthly basis. The uptime listed below is a general figure for Rocket.net and Pantheon. but it's not necessarily an SLA, see the host's T&Cs for more info. SLAs often include conditions where you get a refund of a portion of monthly fees if the service drops below a certain amount of uptime for that month
Content Delivery Networks are widely distributed networks of servers that can serve your visitors important files such as images and CSS files from a server close to their location, which can significantly increase your site speed.
Security
Website security is extremely important and all websites should be considered to be at risk. It's important to pick a host that takes security seriously. Below are some of the key security features that are offered by Rocket.net and Pantheon.
Conclusion
To find out more about the specs, pricing, and service limitations each of these hosts, then you can use the following links to check out Rocket.net and Pantheon.
That's our head to head comparison between Rocket.net and Pantheon Thank you for reading, we hope this will help you to choose between them!