Blockchain Node Hosting in the Cloud (Step-by-Step Guide)

The expansion of web3 and crypto services in the last few years has led to a whopping $2T cryptocurrency market capitalization and a significant increase in demand for reliable blockchain hosting infrastructures. The increasing expectations from developers, small and medium businesses, exchanges, and enterprises to host their blockchain decentralized applications (dApps) in the cloud are elevating the demands on hosting companies to provide reliable, secure, and cost-effective options.

The soaring popularity of blockchain and the opportunities therein attracted a lot of coders who started offering web3 wallets, trading, and custody services. Similarly, the money poured into the space attracted many hackers and bad actors who quickly exploited unprepared crypto developers, resulting in more than $2b of stolen funds.

Fortunately, there is a solution for hosting blockchain applications that need robust security, compliance, and flexibility with US OVHcloud.

Common Blockchain Application Types

If you are new to developing blockchain applications, it’s beneficial to describe common applications.

What are some popular applications of blockchain by industry?

• Finance and Banking - creating crypto wallets, exchanges, and staking services.
• Healthcare - developing robust backend HIPAA-compliant systems to store patient data and leverage services like digital identity and smart contracts.
• Real estate - tokenizing real-world assets is significant in the blockchain space as it can unlock investment opportunities by enabling secondary trading on assets that are typically illiquid, such as condos and other real estate properties.
• Supply chain - by leveraging smart contracts, developers can offset the typical complexities of orchestrating multiple independent processes and streamlining activities on a single, immutable ledger.
• Government - using a decentralized identity, a developer can create a highly performant and trusted public record. Paired with the traditional private permission blockchain network, this can bring trust and compliance with state and federal regulators.
• Cyber Security - blockchains capture immutable data, which can serve as a digital fingerprint for tracking online activities and providing remediation services.

What are typical blockchain network configurations?

It is helpful to examine the typical setup of a blockchain network to understand it better.

First, let's define common blockchain network deployment scenarios. A blockchain network is defined as a cluster of nodes that run the same software and communicate via devp2p or libp2p to exchange messages and agree on the consensus algorithm.

There are three primary types of blockchain networks:

1. Private, permission - where all the nodes and participants in the network are known and verified entities. These types of networks are typical for enterprise clients where trust and security are of utmost importance. They use the hosted private OVHcloud deployments that offer robust security and compliance
2. Public, permissionless - typical examples include the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana networks. They are open for anyone to join as long as they run the appropriate client and download the software on their local node. This explicitly puts a lot of requirements on the node itself in terms of bandwidth, disk capacity, disk space, and latency.
   The typical hardware to support public network nodes is managed by dedicated, bare metal, and VPS nodes by OVHcloud. With bare metal node deployments, you can keep private key material safe in Intel SGX trusted execution environments. This offers a balance between performance, price, and reliability.
3. Hybrid networks - Hybrid networks are crypto networks with a mix of known and unknown parties. Typically, a company operates the validator nodes, and anyone else can run a non-validator node anonymously. Examples of such networks include BSC from Binance and Ripple.

Deciding what kind of network will host your application is critical because each configuration carries different security threats and risks.

What are the differentiating cloud capabilities for blockchain developers? Why OVHcloud?

Let’s define the critical hosting capabilities that distinguish experienced blockchain hosting providers from newcomers:

1. Ability to prevent DDOS attacks - DDOS, or distributed denial of service, is an indispensable feature that every developer should be aware of. A dedicated server for Bitcoin from OVHcloud is supported by the Anti-DDoS infrastructure by default, which defends against malicious activity. Check out our blog on blockchain node security.
2. Ability to host terabytes of data - It’s no secret that a public Ethereum full-node can take up to 12 TB of data, which is impossible to store on a medium-sized server. Hence, the need for cloud hosting with comprehensive data storage and data retrieval services.
3. Compliance and security certificates (ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018, & 27701 Certificate and HIPAA, SOC I and II Type 2 attestations) - As a developer that invests time in the building in the public space, you’ll need a trusted partner who you know has been vetted and supports robust ISO and HIPAA attestations.
4. Need for Speed - deploying on a publicly-facing server web3 application increases the demands for performance and throughput. Most developers will appreciate the speed and performance of the high bandwidth offering from OVHcloud, especially for blockchain applications which can be heavy on the compute requirements. For example, running a full Ethereum node requires the following setup: CPU 4+ cores, 16 GB+ of RAM, a fast SSD drive with at least 1TB, and 25 MBit/s bandwidth.
   All those demands can be easily met with a few clicks of an Advance-5 dedicated server configuration. As a leading node provider for blockchain, OVHcloud has more options available, such as bitcoin-dedicated servers.
5. Web3 readiness - building in public can be an easy task when you find the right blockchain cloud partner that offers modern and easy-to-use web3 services. For example, with OVHcloud, the block storage service makes tedious tasks, such as running an IPFS node, seamless and easy. Similarly, you can run full Ethereum or Solana nodes with a few clicks and commands.
6. Easy set up of private networks with vRack - easy, few-click installs for a private network with the optimal security grade and ringfencing on a global multi-datacenter scale.

How to deploy a private Avalanche subnet on OVHcloud

Running an Avalanche subnet is a resource-demanding operation requiring sizable cloud hosting with SSD disk space and sufficient bandwidth. Deploying an Avalanche subnet will allow developers to actively join the network and complement their dApp experience with accurate network data and participation in Avax network governance.

Here’s the best practice configuration for running an Avalanche subnet:

CPU: Equivalent of 8 AWS vCPU
RAM: 6 GiB
Storage: 1 TiB with at least 3000 IOPS
OS: Ubuntu 20.04
Network: Reliable IPv4 or IPv6 network connection with an open public port

For this, we will use the above-mentioned Advance-5 dedicated server, with SGX enabled, which is perfect for preserving sensitive materials like private keys and crypto content. Make sure you have installed OpenStack on the dedicated server.

1. Create a private network

openstack network create net01

2. Activate the DHCP

openstack subnet create --dhcp --network net01 10.0.0.0/8

3. Create a VMID

subnet-cli wizard \ --ledger \ --node-ids=NodeID-741aqvs6R4iuHDyd1qT1NrFTmsgu78dc4,NodeID-K7Y79oAmBntAcdkyY1CLxCim8QuqcZbBp,NodeID-C3EY6u4v7DDi6YEbYf1wmXdvkEFXYuXNW,NodeID-AiLGeqQfh9gZY3Y8wLMD15tuJtsJHq5Qi \ --vm-genesis-path=prod-genesis.json \ --vm-id=tGas3T58KzdjLHhBDMnH2TvrddhqTji5iZAMZ3RXs2NLpSnhH \ --chain-name=prodSubnet

4. Done! You can check the Subnet explorer

Guide to hosting blockchain nodes in the cloud

Whether you run a crypto wallet, a staking service, or a crypto exchange platform, you need a stable, secure, scalable, and price-efficient server.

OVHcloud is solidifying its position as a prominent provider of blockchain node hosting services by focusing on elevated security, compliance, price flexibility, and speed. Contact us today to learn how.