A church site does the same thing every week: publishes a sermon, takes giving, and gets most of its traffic on one morning. The hosting should assume all three.
New media every week, one predictable traffic peak, and donation pages that must never be served from a cache.
Audio and video are served from the edge with byte-range support, so a listener can skip to twenty minutes in without the server sending the first twenty, and without a PHP worker held open for the stream.
A weekly upload is fifty files a year and it never stops, so storage is sized for accumulation rather than for a launch-day snapshot that looked fine at the time.
Donation and gift-aid pages bypass the cache entirely and are never shared between visitors, so nobody is shown a form carrying somebody else's details.
The weekly peak is a known shape rather than an incident, and it is part of what the plan is sized for instead of something billed as an overage afterwards.
Rota, newsletter and event editing sit behind roles that do not include plugin installation, and staging exists for the changes that genuinely need it.
Church sites are usually maintained by a volunteer with several other responsibilities. The dashboard is built for somebody who checks it monthly rather than daily.
The peak is narrow, predictable and mostly media. Sizing for the weekday average is what makes a church site slow on the one morning it matters.
These are the settings that differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan. Each follows from a weekly publishing cycle with one predictable peak.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Media delivery | Edge-served with byte-range support, off the PHP workers | A thirty-minute sermon streamed through PHP occupies a worker for the length of the sermon. |
| Storage | Sized for weekly accumulation rather than a fixed allowance | Fifty new recordings a year is a growth curve, and a fixed allowance only moves the problem into year two. |
| Full-page cache | Bypassed on giving, gift-aid and prayer-request URLs | Anything a person types about their finances or their circumstances must not be capable of being served to the next visitor. |
| Peak capacity | Provisioned for the weekly service window | The Sunday peak is a recurring shape rather than an incident, and treating it as an overage penalises the site for working. |
| User roles | Volunteer editing without plugin or theme rights | The person updating the rota should not be one click away from installing something that takes the site down before a service. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, sermon media from the edge, and giving pages that stay private.