Case Study: Universal Church achieves scalable, high-availability web delivery and $1.25M in hardware savings with Amazon Web Services

Universal Church - Customer Case Study

Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church) is a global Pentecostal organization founded in Brazil with a heavy online presence—its Portal Arca Universal and founder Bishop Macedo’s blog together draw over 30 million page views per month. The church’s outsourced hosting repeatedly failed during high‑traffic TV and radio events—20 servers were maxed out, causing outages, and purchasing capacity to cover peaks would have been prohibitively expensive.

Working with AWS partner Dedalus, the church migrated to Amazon Web Services in four days, running its sites and streaming infrastructure in an Amazon VPC using Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, ~30 EC2 instances, Amazon S3 (≈5 TB), and CloudFront. The move delivered on‑demand scalability, higher availability, security and performance, eliminated the need for costly hardware purchases, and is estimated to save about $1.25 million in hardware and labor while enabling plans to move fully to the AWS Cloud.

Universal Church

Rodrigo Prota

Pastor and IT Director