Increased hosting capacity

Traffic loads on internet companies have increased greatly since the Covid-19 outbreak, due to people being at home and consuming massive amounts of media.

We at Church Plant Media have also seen tremendous traffic growth on our systems, with traffic to our systems growing by nearly 100%.

Increased traffic

Some of you experienced some site unavailability a week ago (Sunday, March 22), and we fine-tuned our infrastructure last week in an effort to handle more traffic for this past weekend. We had another issue two days ago (Saturday, March 28), as traffic loads peaked again. In response to that, we modified a few more settings, and during yesterday's services (Sunday, March 29), we hit our sweet spot. Our systems were blazing fast and served websites quickly and reliably.

Increased capacity

Even though yesterday went off without a hitch, we increased our capacity again this morning, to prepare for future traffic growth. We only expect traffic to continue to increase, and we will be ready!

Devoted to serving you

We take seriously our responsibility to quickly and reliably deliver your website. While we had a couple of stumbles over the past week, our team and our systems passed yesterday's test with flying colors.

Continued monitoring

We will continue to monitor and adjust as needed, and staff will be on hand during the weekends to respond as needed. Please don't hesitate to let us know how we may serve you during this extraordinary time. We are here to help!

Dustin Stearman
Founder
Church Plant Media

P.S. For the geeks in our audience, you're probably wanting to know exactly what we adjusted. So, here you go. :)

• We doubled the number of concurrent connections (nginx worker_connections) the servers can process while more efficiently utilizing the hardware resources available to them.
• We increased the nginx worker_connections by 200%.
• We increased the open file limit for php-fpm by 250%.
• We increased the pm.max_children setting for all domains by at least 600%. Higher traffic domains received an even bigger boost.
• We have set up a cloud hosting environment, and are in the process of moving sites to it.
• We moved some of our databasing to the cloud, which is able to infinitely scale with demand.