Launch Your Pantheon Site

Berkeley's Pantheon hosting service is intended for sites hosted at berkeley.edu domains and owned by Berkeley departments and employees. If your site uses a non-berkeley.edu domain, or if the primary owner is not a Berkeley employee, it is not eligible for our discounts and additional features.

How to Launch a UC Berkeley Site on Pantheon

  1. Make sure your latest code and content is pushed to your live environment
  2. Provide Web Platform Services with a chartstring and hosting details by filling out the Upgrade to Paid Plan form
  3. Register your domain for CalNet authentication
  4. Request a DNS change for your domain(s) by filling out the Socreg Offsite Hosting form
  5. Add your domain(s) to the live environment on your Pantheon dashboard and allow HTTPS to provision (this can take up to an hour)
    1. This can be done before filling out the Socreg form if your domain is not yet in use on another Pantheon site.

Agree to the Terms of Service on the "Upgrade to Paid Plan" Form

  • Do you agree that this site will always use a berkeley.edu domain as its primary address?
  • Do you agree that this site will not contain protected data?
  • Do you agree to use UC Berkeley authentication best practices?
  • Do you agree with the Memorandum of Understanding and Terms of Service?

If you do not agree to these terms, you will not be able to host your site on Pantheon. If you have security-related questions about your specific website, please contact the Information Security and Policy team.

DNS (Domain Name System) Information

After submitting the Socreg Offsite Hosting form, you will receive a message the campus DNS Administrator confirming when the domain will be updated in the campus DNS. The DNS Administrator may take up to a week or more to process DNS requests. 

Domains on Pantheon should be A records. This is recommended due to Pantheon's platform configurations; however, CNAMEs should continue to work.

HTTPS

All Berkeley sites hosted on Pantheon should be served over HTTPS for improved security and search engine optimization. Pantheon provides free, shared HTTPS certificates via Let's Encrypt. See Pantheon's HTTPS page for more information. 

All HTTP requests should be redirected to HTTPS. See Add Domain Normalization Code to settings.php (Drupal) and Pantheon's Redirect for SEO and Security. 

Additional Information

We also recommend that you run through a site testing checklist to make sure your site is ready, and enable scheduled Pantheon backups. See Pantheon's Launch Essentials page. 

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