Case Study: National Review achieves lower costs and flawless scalability with Pantheon

National Review Cuts Costs, Improves Performance on Pantheon

National Review, a 60‑year‑old print magazine that now publishes daily digital content and drives over 300 million pageviews a year, was struggling with frequent downtime and rising hidden costs from a bargain hosting provider. Traffic spikes and misconfigured infrastructure (Varnish, Apache, Memcache) forced their dev team into firefighting mode, undermining reliability and increasing total cost of ownership.

After moving to Pantheon, a pre‑launch audit and configuration fixes enabled a zero‑downtime migration and CDN tuning. Pantheon’s hands‑on support, transparent workflows, and automatic scaling eliminated traffic‑related outages, reduced maintenance overhead, lowered costs, and freed the dev team to focus on active development.

National Review

Chris McEvoy

Vice President of Editorial Operations