Introduction

Nodes are the backbone of a blockchain network. They process transactions and keep track of them. It’s crucial to set up your nodes correctly, but there are a few crucial mistakes administrators tend to make in the process. These mistakes could impact your node endpoint user’s ability to use and access the blockchain network.

Over the years, we’ve heard reports of Web3 and blockchain applications underperforming and falling prey to attacks. Many of these problems could have been prevented if development teams had followed the proper steps during the node setup stage.

This article will cover five of the most common mistakes when setting up blockchain nodes and the extra steps to avoid them.

Ignoring Security Precautions

You don't have to be paranoid about your blockchain node getting hacked, but you should be aware that hackers can cause problems if they find a way in. For example, they could bloat your node endpoint and cause it to fail or even crash.

While this doesn’t necessarily happen often, there is a way people can find your node's RPC endpoint and connect to it. If a malicious user accesses a node you are hosting locally, they could congest it by sending frequent requests, causing it to crash.

You can prevent this by simply configuring your node to only accept requests from trusted users (IP addresses) so that any outside requests will be invalid.

Nodes are critical components for any Blockchain network, so it's essential to take good care of them. You must ensure that your node is secure and protected from attacks by hackers or other malicious actors.

Not Setting Up Monitoring

Neglecting to set up monitoring is another costly mistake when setting up a blockchain node. Blockchain nodes must be monitored and maintained to make sure they’re running smoothly. If you do not have a monitoring system, you won’t know if your node is performing as expected.

Node metrics and statistics will help you understand how your node is performing, when it’s healthy, and when it requires more resources (due to an increase in your user base and on-chain activities).

Don’t wait until your node is down to realize something is wrong. You can avoid outages by anticipating and preventing problems before they occur. The only way to do this consistently is by keeping track of your node’s status at all times.

No Resource Scaling Plan

When you’re setting up a blockchain node, you need to have a plan for scaling its resources. Suppose there’s a spike in requests on your network that causes congestion. If you don’t have a scaling plan, your whole system could crash due to a lack of resources or network performance issues.

The main problem here is that without a plan, you’re unprepared for what might happen. If the number of requests to your node grows too quickly, it can overload it and make it unusable.

If you have a large percentage of users on your network, you must ensure your nodes have enough resources to keep up with demand. You also need to make sure that they're running at total capacity so they can handle as much traffic as possible without crashing or slowing down.

Limited Access to Blockchain Data

Make sure that the type of node you’re using is able to give you all the access to blockchain data that you need. It’s important to consider the kinds of operations you’ll be performing on your blockchain of choice when selecting a node type.

For example, if you need to be able to track blockchain transactions from the past, a pruned node wouldn’t be the right choice for you. This is the kind of decision you want to make well before you actually set up your node. It’s crucial to research what node type matches best with what your application or project needs.

Furthermore, some node service providers limit what you can do on blockchains and will not provide you with crucial, up-to-date data. That data includes crucial financial information — so you must make sure you’re using a service provider that will give you complete access to it in real time.

Outdated Blockchain Software

Finally, it’s important to run updated blockchain software. Using outdated software could be catastrophic for you, your business, and the entire blockchain ecosystem.

An example is the Ethereum fork that happened last year. The fork occurred because most Ethereum nodes were running an outdated version of the Ethereum client (Geth) software. There was a bug in that old version of the client — but while it had long been fixed in Geth's updated versions, it was found that many nodes were still running the old, unpatched versions.

Most people don't realize that the software that runs your node is just as essential as your hardware itself. The more outdated the blockchain software is, the more likely it is to cause problems in a blockchain application.

Conclusion

In this article, we examined five of the most common mistakes people make when launching a blockchain node and showed you how to avoid them.

Managing a blockchain node is difficult, especially if you have to do everything from scratch. However, InfStones makes the whole process easy to understand and simple to execute. We provide security features to help you protect your node services and a top-notch monitoring tool to help you keep an eye on things.

Additionally, thanks to our dynamic scaling feature, you can scale your node as your apps grow. You can update your node software with a simple click of a button and even authorize InfStones to keep your node software updated with the latest version.

To sum it all up, we don't limit your access to the blockchain your node is connected to —instead, we give you all the resources and assistance you'll ever need to create and scale Web3 applications.