Dedicated vs shared RPC
Dedicated vs Shared RPC: Choosing for Production Workloads
Compare shared and dedicated blockchain RPC by workload isolation, operational control, historical data, support, and total cost.
By DTEAM Infrastructure Team · Updated
The short answer
A shared RPC endpoint can be a good fit for development, low-volume use, and workloads that tolerate the provider's standard limits and operating model. Dedicated RPC is worth evaluating when an application needs capacity reserved for its workload, a specific endpoint configuration, or closer operational coordination.
“Dedicated” does not automatically mean faster or more reliable. The result depends on the chain, client, hardware, network path, workload, and service agreement. Compare measured results and documented commitments rather than relying on the label.
Compare the workload, not just the endpoint
Before choosing a service, write down the production workload it must support:
- Which networks, APIs, and methods does the application call?
- What are the normal and peak request rates, payload sizes, and concurrency?
- Does it use HTTP, WebSocket subscriptions, or both?
- Does it need recent chain data, historical blocks, or historical state?
- What latency, error rate, recovery time, and support expectations are acceptable?
- Are there security requirements for authentication, IP access, or separating environments?
These requirements help distinguish a capacity problem from a missing method, chain coverage, or application retry issue.
Where shared RPC can fit
Shared endpoints are usually simpler to start with. They can be appropriate for prototypes, internal tools, low or variable traffic, and teams that do not need a custom node setup. Check the actual plan terms for rate limits, fair-use policies, supported methods, archive access, and support response expectations.
If a shared endpoint is struggling, first measure the requests that fail and when they fail. A high error rate could come from bursts, provider limits, a chain incident, an unsupported method, an oversized response, or client-side retry behavior. Moving to a dedicated endpoint will not fix every cause.
When to evaluate dedicated RPC
Dedicated capacity may be useful when sustained production traffic needs workload isolation, when a team needs configuration choices that a shared service does not offer, or when a service depends on predictable access to archive data. Teams with strict availability requirements should also evaluate redundancy and failover across endpoints or regions; one dedicated node can still be a single point of failure.
Ask providers to document the details that matter to your use case: included networks and methods, request policies, WebSocket support, historical data depth, monitoring, maintenance, escalation, and any service-level commitments. Test with representative traffic and compare latency percentiles, timeouts, and error rates over the same period.
A practical evaluation checklist
- Record a baseline for request volume, latency, and errors.
- Test the exact chains, methods, payloads, and subscriptions used in production.
- Include peak and sustained traffic, not only a short happy-path test.
- Confirm how failover, maintenance, and incident communication work.
- Compare the full operating cost, including engineering time and data retention needs.
If you are assessing a dedicated setup, see DTEAM's RPC and node infrastructure and share your network and workload requirements with the team.