Direct Award - Pantheon, Enterprise Website Hosting Platform

The West Virginia Department of Education is making a direct award for renewal of the Pantheon Enterprise Website Hosting Platform with proposals due October 27, 2026 at 10:30 a.m. This is a sole-source procurement; the Department determined that the application is engineered specifically around Pantheon's architecture with approximately $600,000 in vendor technical work and sixteen months of development invested, and that migrating to an alternative platform would require re-engineering the search function, caching architecture, file storage, and deployment workflows—operationally risky and cost-prohibitive before the December 12, 2026 go-live date.

The scope covers hosting and infrastructure services for wvde.us, the Department's central public website, delivered on the Pantheon.io platform. Deliverables include hosting infrastructure, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), Apache Solr-based search service, caching performance improvements, development/test/live environment workflows with on-demand development environments, command-line deployment and automation tooling, automated backup and restore capabilities, platform-level cybersecurity monitoring and patching, uptime monitoring, bot protection, auto-scaling, and technical support. Performance must begin December 12, 2026, with no lapse in service.

The contract value is $81,000 annually, totaling $324,000 over the initial four-year potential term (December 12, 2026 through December 11, 2027, with three one-year renewal options). The annual pricing is composed of Diamond Package ($30,000), Elite 1M Annual Advanced ($26,000), Global CDN with WAF/10 ($18,000), and Secure Integration Charge ($7,000). The Department reduced scope by removing MultiZone Failover, lowering annual costs by $4,000 compared to previous procurement years.

Bids should be submitted to Michelle L. Childers, procurement officer, West Virginia Department of Education, Building 6 Room 700, 1900 Kanawha Boulevard East, Charleston, West Virginia 25305. Contact: (304) 558-2686 or michelle.childers@k12.wv.us.