Who is this (really) for?
Can anyone run an RPC?
You can think of running an RPC node a lot like mining Bitcoin in the sense that if you have electricity and tech skills, you can earn some extra scratch for putting them out there in the world.
But you can't think about it as a 1:1 perfect match.
Running an RPC is best suited for a systems administrator with at least 1 year of experience working with cloud and Linux technologies. Sure, some unicorns could get by with less experience, and yes, we are here to help!
But I want to be clear - running an RPC server is NOT for everyone. Here are some questions to help you figure out where your skillset lies relative to what is needed to run an RPC:
- Define what SSH is
- What is the difference between baremetal and a virtual machine
- What is latency in terms of a network? What is latency in terms of a disk?
- What is the difference between an HDD, SSD, and nVME?
- What Ubuntu utility is used to create disk partitions?
- What Ubuntu utility is used to create filesystems on top of disk partitions?
- What would you pipe an Ubuntu log file to if you wanted to search the log file for a specific keyword?
- Nano or Vim? (yes, I will judge you based on your answer)
- What is swap (related to memory)?
See, notice I didn't ask any questions about Solana? It's not expected that you know a lot about Solana yet (but it certainly helps). And to be completely honest, you don't even need to know the answer to all of those things above off of the top of your head - you just need to be able to hold the conversation around these things and probably relate them back to some professional experience you've had in the past. Hell, we all google our jobs anyways, right?
So if you've made it this far and you want to see what's next, we'll move on to how big your server has to be to run an RPC.
PLEASE NOTE: We are currently pausing Shadow Operator registration as we kickstart the Premium RPC program with our long time alpha testers. Please check back SOON
Last modified 5mo ago