The 3 Most Important Things to Consider when Selecting an Ethereum Gateway Service
Whether you’re a developer dreaming up a the next big DeFi innovation, or you’re the CTO of a Fortune 500 company exploring how Ethereum fits with your company, you’re probably feeling a bit like Alice — tumbling down the rabbit hole. But there’s no denying that Ethereum, the blockchain with the world’s most active developer community, is on the cusp of going mainstream.
So first things first, congratulations on not missing the boat!
“If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.”
— Gen. Eric Shinseki
The good news is, the most difficult step is already out of the way, because you’ve decided to make the leap. But learning how to operationalize a new technology can be daunting. Luckily, you can cut the difficulty down by an order of magnitude by subscribing to a cloud-based Ethereum gateway service.
While it is certainly an option to host your own infrastructure, you should be prepared to absorb a number of costs as you scale up — some of which are not immediately apparent. If you decide to go this route, you’ll have to bear much more than the cost of hosting the infrastructure. You’ll need to consider things like availability and uptime, operationalization/management best practices, DevOps hiring and training, and more.
The most important thing to remember if you host your own infrastructure is that the architecture of the most popular Ethereum node clients — such as Geth and Parity — cannot be easily and quickly restarted. If something goes wrong, you can expect downtime measured in hours or even days.
When you’re selecting an Ethereum gateway service, the three most important things to look for are 1) understandable pricing models, 2) ease of integration, and 3) customer-friendly policies.
Understandable Pricing Models
Providers have a variety of pricing models and policies, some of which are easier to understand than others. You should look for policies that are transparent and public, that don’t involve pricing tiers (which may impose a surprise increase in cost in times of high growth or spikes in volume), and that don’t impose abstractions to meter your use.
With Rivet, for example, we designed the pricing model with our customers in mind — to be pay-as-you-go based directly on query volume and simple to understand. And as to transparency, Rivet has a calculator where you can see exactly what your costs will be. Try it out yourself at this hyperlink.
Ease of Integration
Providers can take a variety of approaches to their service that impact ease of integration. Things to consider here are whether you can sign up and set up the service without first signing an agreement or talking to a salesperson, whether you have direct access to usage metrics, and how much control you have over your api keys.
With Rivet, we designed our service to allow you to sign up instantly, and you can control and manage your keys very easily from our dashboard. We’re currently providing some basic core usage metrics, with plans to expand as we learn what people need and will find most useful.
Customer-friendly Policies
While not many regular users of the web take the time to thoroughly read things like terms of use or privacy policies, when selecting an Ethereum gateway, this is an absolute must. Because this is a new technology, each provider can take a drastically different approach that will impact your endeavors in ways that are not immediately apparent on the surface.
Some providers keep important terms in private agreements that you can only see after you’ve already made a commitment. And privacy policies can vary from very protective (as is the case with Rivet) to nonexistent.
Additionally, you should pay careful attention to the degree of support and uptime promised in these terms. With Rivet, for example, we offer a three-9 uptime guarantee — while others, such as Cloudflare, only offer their service as-is with no promises of support.
Finally, do you want to be able to try the service before you commit to any long term contracts? Do you want long term contracts at all? While some providers require them, many do not. With Rivet, we’ve opted for a pay-as-you-go approach, and you can leave at any time if you aren’t satisfied. Additionally, we start all customers off with our no-commitments free plan that will let you try it out on your own time, allowing you to upgrade to a paid plan on your schedule.
The only way to discover this information is to review providers’ sites and read the actual terms—and only sign up if you’re satisfied they’re not demanding too much, offering too little, or otherwise setting you up to fail.
But that’s not all.
While the above 3 items are the most critical when you’re just starting out, you’ll almost certainly want to consider a number of other things, such as whether the technologies you want to build with are supported, whether the company you’re selecting aligns with your values, or whether it’s important to you that your service provider is built on open source technologies.
Going forward, we’ll be posting more frequently about these considerations and more. In the meantime, if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out and talk to us. The OpenRelay team built Rivet because we know Ethereum is going to be a big part of the future of computing, and we’re here to help you get a head start.
Published at Tue, 11 Feb 2020 16:02:36 +0000
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