Best practices to use a node as multiuser node

Question

At the moment I am trying to set up a webservice encapsulating ethereum behind an easy webinterface and do stuff like:

• create, manage accounts
• deploy contract
• ...

Mining is not neccessary.

I don't know if it is secure to use one node for all users / accounts. That would mean the node knows all accounts and all accounts are unlocked all the time.

But the other way around (setting up a node fore every user of the service) would be a big resource problem. Every node downloading the whole blockchain locally...

Is it possible at all to use a single node in a multi-ethereum-user scenario? I am talking about 1k users per node.

Answer 1

Yes I believe it's possible. In your case, one approach would be to have users manage their account client side only. They could sign transactions on the client side and send to the node. That way you do not need to manage accounts directly on the node. Here's a similar question/answer that may be helpful:

Can a user send a transaction using my website frontend with an account which is not in my node?