Hosting & Reliability

Field Link Missions is a hosted service: there is nothing for your church to install, patch, or back up. This section explains where your data lives and what to expect from the platform day to day.

Where Your Data Lives

• Application and database — run in a DigitalOcean cloud data center in the United States, behind automatic HTTPS. The database holds your missionaries, organizations, users, settings and analytics.
• Photos, prayer letters and videos — stored in DigitalOcean Spaces, a redundant object-storage service that keeps multiple copies of every file across separate drives. Media is kept in a private bucket that only the application can read; it is served to your visitors through the Field Link Missions domain, with caching, so the URLs on your map never change and popular images load instantly. Uploaded videos are handed to viewers as short-lived links straight from the storage service, so a video that many people open at once plays smoothly without slowing the rest of the site, and a copied video link stops working after a few hours.
• Map tiles — the OpenStreetMap-based basemap is served from our own servers with no third-party map providers involved (see Public Map).

Updates & Maintenance

Improvements are released regularly. A rollout swaps the application over in well under a minute, and during that window the site shows a short "Field Link Missions is updating" page instead of an error. The page checks every few seconds and reloads itself as soon as the site is back, so a kiosk left running in the lobby recovers on its own. Nothing you have entered is affected by an update.

If you ever see the updating page for more than a few minutes, something needs our attention — email support@fieldlinkmissions.com.

Backups

Two layers, so you are never dependent on just one:

• Platform backups — every hour, the database is snapshotted and all media is mirrored to a separate backup area, and restore points are kept going back twelve months. Anything deleted or overwritten is retained for over a year. If a church, a missionary or a photo needs to come back as it was at a particular time, email support@fieldlinkmissions.com with the church name and roughly when — we restore it without touching anything else.
• Your own export — at any time you can download a complete copy of your church's data and files from Settings → Import & Export. We recommend taking one after any large batch of changes and keeping it somewhere safe. The export can be re-imported into Field Link Missions, and the data is plain JSON alongside your original files.

Security in Brief

All traffic is encrypted with HTTPS. Passwords are hashed, two-factor secrets and integration credentials are encrypted at rest, and every church's data is isolated to its own workspace. Full details are in the Privacy Policy.