By Cal Evans, GetPantheon

Hosting is dead, workflow killed it.

Hosting is dead, workflow killed it.

Many developers these days still work by FTPing files up to the server to deploy. Some of the lucky ones have a full development environment on their laptop, but that doesn’t help much when you need to show your progress to a client across the country. Most of us have created work-arounds, but in most cases they are inelegant or down right kludgy. Pantheon solves your workflow problem. Pantheon gives you a platform to both develop and deploy your websites.

With Pantheon, you get 3 identical environments with every website you set up.

• Development
• Testing
• Live

No more keeping multiple servers in sync. No more maintaining a server, even for development. No more explaining to the client “it will run better on the live server.” All of your environments on Pantheon run on the same infrastructure – not just similar – as the production environment.

A click of a button sets your new sandbox. You use either SFTP or GIT to push code to your new development area, and see your results immediately. Once you are happy with everything, another button click will move you code and/or data to your testing area so that you can show your code to your client. Your client can test everything, even share it and show it off. All while you continue to develop in the development environment.

Once everybody is happy, you can push your new site to production. Voila, you are done, right? If only life were that simple.

Time marches on.

• Your client will have new requests
• Plugins will release new version
• The core will release security patches

Thanks to Pantheon’s workflow, you always had a development area where you can pull all these together and make sure nothing breaks. Once you are satisfied, you pull data from production and you push code from development into your test environment. Now you can ensure all your changes work well with your production data, before pushing everything live.

Finally, each of your three environments has it’s own backup schedule. You set how often each environment is backed up. Because regardless of our best intentions, sometimes things go wrong and you need to back up a step or two.

Stop hosting your website. Put it on Pantheon and enjoy the freedom of developing it.

Note: This is one in a series of guest posts from our local sponsors. Cal Evans is a developer advocate at GetPantheon. Pantheon is the sponsor of the WordCamp 2014 after-party at the Flying Saucer, from 5 to 9 p.m. Saturday, May 3.