Over the past few months, I have been running hirenodes.io as a provider for various Web3 services. This includes helping to ensure data integrity as well as just keeping the availability of the services high. This has allowed for many interesting discoveries with why people want a service like this.
Security
Overall security is something that most people don’t tend to think about. One of the benefits that I have helped to provide is monitoring and everything. Most developers want to try to have secure nodes, but there are some things that just take time to understand. These are not always the most straightforward items nor the most obvious.
This is primarily helping to ensure that ports are locked down as appropriate. However, this also involves a lot of DDoS protection. Many of the services require public endpoints. This means that someone can easily inspect, watch the network, and get the endpoint. This is something that becomes incredibly important when dealing with globally accessed applications.
Data
A lot of this discussion becomes “It is decentralized right?” However, this doesn’t always capture the full breadth of everything. with IPFS it does provide a decentralized manner and you can pin items on multiple nodes. This still requires ensuring that the data on the nodes is being stored properly and backed up properly.
Monitoring
Many groups feel that these systems are set and forget types of things. There is a constant need to monitor any service that is deployed to ensure uptime. This means building the appropriate alerts to have a notification whenever something stops working. This allows us to provide higher levels of uptime and prevent their users from being the ones to report something is not working.
Overall
Running a service that just provides a hosted service has been interesting. It has allowed for a lot of interesting discoveries as well as helping to provide a really solid service. The main thing is that rather than building an intermediary to handle the requests and do a pay-per-use. I provide a full node just for the end user. This has provided a different level set of problems and benefits. Fortunately, with this, there is no bad actor that brings down everyone when something goes off the rails but there are significantly more VMs to manage. This has been a beneficial trade-off to help ensure everything runs smoothly.
I look forward to continuing to run HireNodes and seeing where it goes. We are currently offering Ceramic and Graph nodes with plans to expand much more in the future. In the end being able to pay for a single service like this and just have it done has been something I have really enjoyed providing.