Pantheon Helpdesk

Quick DNS Reference

Pantheon global routing information for non-SSL sites - choose one or the other (not both):

DNS CNAME Record: edge.live.getpantheon.com

​Or

Load-balanced IP for DNS A Record: 50.56.49.247

If you use SSL, use the Static IP address from your control panel for your DNS A Record(s) and do not use a CNAME record.

Be Prepared

Going live on Pantheon has a few steps. When you get close, we recommend you prep the live environment at least 24 hours if not longer before your launch date. The best practice is to fully test/vet your live setup before launching. Measure twice, cut once.

Paying for Pantheon

Before you can set up custom domain names, you have to start paying.

We engineered Pantheon to support you for every site you build, and also to facilitate the "hand off" between a developer and a client when it comes time to launch or turn over a site at the end of a project. Because of this, we make a distinction between credit cards in your account, and cards paying for sites. It's a two-step process.

The best way to handle taking a site live is to first set up the card on your account. You do this from the account overview screen. After that, navigate to the site you're ready to start paying for, and click the "Plan" tab to get to the payment information area. You can then associate the card with the site.

Setting up the Domain with Pantheon

Once you have set up a credit card and associated it with your site, you can use the "Custom Domain Names" interface to add domains to your environments. Just click the "Add Domain" button in the environment of your choice.

Of course for going live, you will want add the domain(s) to live; but you are also now able to add your own custom staging and dev domains if you like.

Note that you need to explicitly add all the domains you intend to use: often that means both www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com.

Please note that you are responsible for handling your own domain names and DNS service. This is not something Pantheon provides yet.

Previewing the Live Environment

We strongly recommend setting up your live environment several days (if not weeks) in advance of your launch date.

While the environmental configuration of dev, test and live are all the same, there are unique aspects to your live environment. At a minimum, the custom domain name is different, but you may also have an increased number of DROPs, an SSL cert, or other "live only" infrastructure or configuration.

In order to insure a smooth launch and save yourself a lot of stress and worry, you should configure your live setup well ahead of your launch date, and use your hosts file to test and preview what the "real" live setup will look like. You would add a line like this:

50.56.49.247      www.mydomain.com

Don't forget to remove that line from the hosts file once you point your domain at Pantheon, or if you want to view the old site.

What happens with this trick is that your system no longer resolves the name to the IP address via DNS but instead looks it up from your local hosts file. Pantheon's routing mesh will receive the incoming connection with the correct domain name in the URL and it will route the request to the right DROPs.

Keep in mind that only people that have made this modification will be able to access the site this way: you can share this with your development team, or a tech-savvy client doing QA, but remember they need to undo the change after you launch.

Updating DNS and high availability (non SSL)

Finally, you're ready to go live publicly by changing your DNS records.

You have two options for DNS. If you are able to use a CNAME only, you can use edge.live.getpantheon.com as a CNAME for your chosen domain.

For uses who need to run the "bare domain" for their site (e.g. site.com, not just www.site.com), you will need to to create an A record using an IP address. We maintain a load-balanced IP address for this purpose for our customers: 50.56.49.247.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR AVAILABILITY:  CNAME's provide much more flexibility to deal with outages and failures for edge servers.  When at all possible, use a CNAME instead of an A record.  For highest availability, use a CNAME record to point www.mysite.com to edge.live.getpantheon.com, an A record to point mysite.com to 50.56.49.247, and use permanent redirects to forward mysite.com to www.mysite.com.

Note: Dedicated incoming IP addresses are available for Professional plan customers (and above).

SSL Customers

If you have SSL enabled for your site, you will be given a Static IP address to use as your DNS A record in order to match your domain name on your certificate. Do not use your Static IP in a CNAME record.