Pitt Drupal CMS sites are hosted, developed, and managed on the Pantheon WebOps platform. Pantheon provides Pitt developers and approved vendors a high-performance, scalable environment for building and maintaining web properties.
While units are strongly encouraged to use existing University-supported website platforms for design and content management, those planning to build or outsource design and development work must coordinate with Pitt Digital and UCM before work begins. Eligible projects may be hosted on Pantheon provided they meet University requirements for branding, accessibility, and security.
Site owners are responsible for annual Pantheon hosting costs. Pantheon provides multiple service tiers and optional features to accommodate a wide range of needs.
Standard Features Across Pantheon Plans
Regardless of plan tier, Pantheon hosting includes:
- Technical Support for Web developers.
- Separate development, test/staging, and production environments.
- Git-based version control and a standardized deployment workflow.
- Global CDN, caching, and SSL/HTTPS by default.
- Automated backups with restore options.
- Container-based infrastructure with environment isolation and standard web security best practices.
Performance Tier Features
- Built-in caching / CDN + optimized site-delivery infrastructure: While Basic sites get a CDN and caching, Performance plans provide a more robust infrastructure capable of handling heavier workloads.
- Application caching (e.g. Redis cache) for database-heavy or dynamic sites: This helps speed up dynamic page loads for sites with heavy backend/database usage.
- Pantheon Integrated full-text search (via Solr) — useful for content-heavy sites where search functionality matters.
- Advanced monitoring / performance analytics: Performance plans include New Relic infrastructure monitoring tools (e.g. real-time alerts, performance insights) so you can keep tabs on load, bottlenecks, and health.
AGCDN + WAF/IO
For an additional annual fee, sites may utilize Pantheon's Advanced Global Content Delivery Network (AGCDN), Web Application Firewall (WAF), and advanced image optimization (IO).
- AGCDN + WAF/IO Overview
- Delivery of content through a global network of edge servers, reducing latency and improving page-load times regardless of user location.
- Full-page caching (not just static assets), so HTML and assets are cached at the edge, reducing load on origin containers and databases and helping the site scale under traffic spikes.
- Image optimization at the edge, compressing and optimizing images close to the user to boost load speed and reduce bandwidth usage.
- Stronger security: WAF, DDoS protection, and request filtering
- Includes a Web Application Firewall tuned for common CMS platforms, defending against threats like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, file inclusion vulnerabilities, remote command execution, and session-fixation attacks.
- Blocks malicious or suspicious traffic at the edge before it reaches origin infrastructure, reducing risk and saving server resources.
- Provides rate limiting to mitigate volumetric attacks or abusive request patterns such as brute-force login attempts and aggressive scraping.
- Delivers full-stack security through CDN-level DDoS mitigation, HTTPS/TLS termination, and managed SSL, helping ensure secure, encrypted, and reliable delivery.
- Flexibility & control over content delivery and traffic routing
- Supports domain masking and reverse-proxying, allowing multiple sites or applications to be served under a single domain or path structure.
- Enables edge-level rules such as IP allow/block listing, geolocation-based controls, custom redirects, header modifications, and device detection.
- Allows custom error and maintenance page rules at the edge so branded pages can be served even during downtime or origin errors.
- Operational & cost efficiencies
- Aggressive edge caching for pages, assets, and images reduces load on backend servers, improving scalability and potentially lowering infrastructure and bandwidth costs.
- Simplifies architecture by consolidating caching, HTTPS termination, security, and edge logic into a managed service instead of requiring separate infrastructure or third-party tools.
- Makes migrations and redesigns easier with domain masking, reverse-proxy support, and edge redirects, shortening launch timelines and reducing engineering overhead.
- Better control over content delivery, and regional compliance
- Provides geolocation-based blocking or redirects and IP-based restrictions to control where and how content is delivered, supporting regional compliance and licensing needs.
- Helps maintain a coherent brand and web presence with unified domains, even when underlying applications or CMS instances differ, benefiting SEO, user experience, and IP control.