Announcing General Availability for Australia, Canada, and European Union Regions

Today we’re excited to announce Pantheon’s new Australia, Canada, and European Union regions. Whether you need your WordPress or Drupal site to meet data residency requirements or have a performance use case not solved by caching requests through Pantheon’s Global CDN, we’ve got you covered. Now when you create a new site on Pantheon, you can select from one of four regions across the globe.

Data Residency for Australia, Canada, and European Union

Pantheon sites have all site resources in their region of choice—from application and database containers, to distributed filesystems and request routers, to Redis cache servers and Apache Solr index servers. Let’s break that down:

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Automated and manual backups of all site components (code, database, and files) are stored in the site’s region, created by job workers also running in the site’s region. Additionally, any database or file clones between site environments are run by region-specific job workers.

When a customer selects a specific region as the data location, Pantheon utilizes a Google Cloud Platform data center located in that region to store all data collected by subscribers from the end users. All data transfers from that Google Cloud Platform data center are made in compliance with GDPR and other relevant data transfer regulations—meaning you can now run WordPress or Drupal sites on Pantheon with confidence your visitors are protected.

Agile Website Operations, Now Across Continents

In addition to Pantheon’s developer tools that enable best practice agile operations, our new data center locations unlock new use cases for localized site performance. If your site needs to deliver authenticated traffic to regional end-users or makes heavy use of APIs located in the site’s region, our new regions will reduce latency and improve overall performance.

The most dramatic speedups are for Australia, since it’s so far from our data centers in the United States. We’ve observed performance improvements of 200ms per request or more for Australia end-users. That’s almost 9x faster time to first byte!

For European end-users, we’ve also seen performance improvements of 100ms or more per request, which is a 4x faster time to first byte!

Free to Try with Introductory US Pricing

Want to give it a try? If you’re new to Pantheon, you can start a free trial and when you create a site you’ll have the option to select your site’s region. No matter the region, your sites are eligible for the US price listed. If and when we determine region-specific pricing, we’ll make sure to give plenty of  notice of the change.

We’re also looking forward to broadening and deepening our partner and reseller programs for agencies in Australia, Canada, and Europe. If you’re interested in talking about a project in one of those regions, or if you think we should consider launching another region, please let us know—this is just the beginning of our global expansion!