Spinning up your own blockchain nodes might seem like the ultimate badge of self-reliance. But once you move from devnet -> testnet and then into real-world production, the cracks show fast. Enterprises and serious Web3 builders often discover that managing in-house infra isn’t just a technical overhead—it’s a resource sink, a security liability, and a blocker to scale.
If you’re still running your own nodes, here are five real challenges you’re probably facing—and what to do about them before they start costing you uptime, users, or product velocity.
1. CLI-Based Deployments
Let’s be honest—most node deployments start with a CLI script pulled from GitHub or Discord. For devnet, that might be okay. But for teams working on public testnet/ mainnets, this can be extremely time-consuming and risky. Plus, the learning curve for different ecosystems is different.
Worse, these scripts are often community-maintained, lacking hardening for production-grade use. Permissions may be misconfigured. Secrets may be exposed. What worked on local/ developertestnet becomes a liability in prod—opening up your infra to everything from syncing issues to serious security vulnerabilities.
The fix? Move away from script-based infra. Whether you adopt a hardened internal CI/CD pipeline or shift to a Node-as-a-Service provider, the key is to automate deployments with reproducible, production-grade configurations—tested, version-controlled, and security-audited.
2. Ongoing Chain Management Is a Full-Time Job
Deploying a node is the easy part. Keeping it running through network upgrades, hard forks, validator management, node sales, and integrating on-demand integrations is where the real complexity lies.
Many chains—especially newer ones or those using active governance—push frequent updates. Miss one, and your node may fall out of consensus or desync entirely. Now you’re not just running infra—you’re tracking multiple GitHub repos, release calendars, and Telegram groups just to stay live.
How to solve it? Unless you have a dedicated infra team tracking each protocol’s roadmap, automate this through a managed node provider. The best NaaS platforms handle upgrades and forks in the background, with zero downtime and complete alignment with chain governance. You stay compliant, without chasing forks every Friday night. Plus, they offer infrastructure for validator management, onboarding, and even validator node license sales software.
3. Hitting Near-Perfect Uptime
If your app relies on blockchain infra—whether it’s minting NFTs, processing DeFi transactions, or settling assets—then uptime isn’t just a metric. It’s the backbone of trust.
But keeping nodes online 24/7 is tough. You’re up against DDoS threats, disk exhaustion, memory leaks, sync lag, and sometimes chain-level instability. One missed upgrade or failed process can take your infra offline for hours—and bring everything that depends on it to a halt.
What works? Build with redundancy by default. That means load balancing, regional failovers, automated restarts, and health checks. If that sounds like overkill for a small team, it probably is. Which is exactly why mature teams now rely on infra platforms that offer SLAs and automated uptime management out of the box.
4. Stitching Together Monitoring, Alerts, and Logs
No production-grade infra runs without observability. But if you’re self-hosting, you’ll quickly find yourself patching together multiple open-source tools—Grafana for dashboards, Prometheus for metrics, custom scripts for uptime alerts, log shippers for error tracking, Telegram bots for notifications.
You end up spending more time monitoring your infra than building your product. Worse, there’s no unified view. Something breaks, and it takes hours to debug across fragmented tooling.
What to do instead? Either build a centralized observability stack from day one (not easy), or use a platform where node monitoring, alerting, logs, and status dashboards are built-in and unified. This DevOps upgrade is a prime risk-reduction strategy.
5. Infra Bias Makes Ecosystem Flexibility Hard
This one’s less obvious but equally dangerous. Once you’ve invested heavily in the tooling, infra, and ops needed to support one chain or stack, you get locked in. Suddenly, testing that new Avalanche L1 chain, or trying out a ZKsync Prividium chain, feels expensive—not in capital, but in mental and operational overhead.
The cost of switching is months of re-learning. And for smaller teams, that’s enough friction to kill cross-chain experiments or better-fit product decisions.
How to escape it? Choose infra that’s designed for multi-chain operations. Whether you build your own deployment abstraction or use a NaaS partner that supports all major ecosystems, make sure you’re not locking yourself out of future options because of infra inertia.
Solve these challenges before they start dragging down your velocity. Whether you build better pipelines or move to managed infrastructure, the end goal is the same: production-grade blockchain access without compromising uptime, security, or ecosystem flexibility.
Infrastructure is the foundation. Build it like your business depends on it.
