I want to start a small project and consider to run own node for it. The other day, I just found there are node providers like Alchemy, Infura, and so on. I just did their tutorials, and I think it is easy to use. But I want to know their pros and cons in real dev environments.
If you guys don't mind, could you share your experience using them?
You can easily run your own node
Check the node provider list here - there are also some limited free APIs.
Overall running your node is very labor and resource intensive, especially for a small project. You'll end up spending thousands for the hardware and weeks to sync up a new node.
This article about full vs archive nodes gives an overview about the main challenges and why using a node provider makes sense.
There are many node providers and almost all of them offer at least one node for free.
Some pros of using a node provider is that you will always have someone to maintain the node for you and you can just contact someone in case you have issues.
Cons are that some providers limit what you can do on their free plans.
I recommend Chainstack. Easy to set up, fast nodes, great support, many APIs available, and supports many different chains, I'm a dev advocate for them.
They also have a very good page in the docs with a lot of JSON-RPC API call examples in web3.js, web3.py and some other languages.
