Digital Church Version 2 is Here!

For the past several months, we’ve been moving our development into a new server environment with better scalability and a much more involved server management team. Digital Church is officially moving from a SiteGround Cloud to a GridPane Managed Cloud. GridPane represents the latests in a high level of security, availability, and scalability for Website-As-A-Service businesses like us, and we’re so excited about the level of support we’ve already received from them as we prepared our new home.

What Does This Mean?

Over the past several months, we’ve been bumping up against some of the limitations on SiteGround. They have been excellent for the time we’ve spent there, but we’ve outgrown it a bit. So it was time to get some new digs. GridPane specializes in wordpress installations, and specifically in running multi-site businesses like ours. They work with multiple cloud providers using the latest technology stack available. We’re still getting settled in, working out the kinks and squashing some bugs, but in the long-term, this is going to be the best option for us to move forward and scale as we continue to help more churches and organizations reach more people.

Currently, we have about forty paying clients. We need to scale to 100 as soon as possible in order to get to the next level, and in order to do that, we needed to be ready to grow.

How does this affect client sites?

For now, most of your existing sites are still on SiteGround. We have installed a few sites on the new environment to allow us to put it to the test. We’ll continue to add a few more each week until things are settled in. Once we get there, we will be batch-migrating sites over. The whole process will take a few months, but our goal is to be done by the end of January. When we are ready to migrate your site, we’ll reach out to you.

What will be different?

Not much will look different at first. We’ve been developing our latest features on the new platform, though, which include live streaming integrations and some tweaking of our templates. If you’d like to see a site we built on the new platform, check out Pineville Church. We’re still wrapping up a few revisions for them, but the site is live now, so check it out!

A few other reasons this new platform is better has to do with some integrations with Cloudflare DNS, the ability for client sites to automatically install SSL certificates when the domain is mapped, and a few other super-geeky things. You’ll probably notice that the builder will load faster, the dashboard will be a little snappier, and the caching of your site will be automatically managed.

What is next?

After we get all our client sites migrated, we are going to start working on more templates. We have plans for six new template sites, with over 30 pages each, so we have a lot of work ahead of us.

How can I help?

Please continue to tell people about us! We are just beginning to dip our toes into some paid advertising for the platform, but there are many other businesses like ours out there that we are competing with. Our best way to move forward will be one customer at a time through word of mouth referrals. Please tell your friends to check us out! Also, if you’d like to leave us a review on Facebook or Google, that would be excellent!