How our Elastic Node infrastructure is powering the next generation of Solana DApps
We go beyond static, bare-metal RPC nodes and offer a choice between two high fidelity services: *Dedicated* nodes and *Elastic* nodes.
Dedicated Nodes
With a dedicated node, your DApp has access to its own RPC endpoint that we deploy in a geographic region of your choice.
The benefit of a dedicated node is *speed*
This is because a dedicated node is *located* close to your user base or service while the computing power of the node is *reserved* only for you. Both of these factors result in minimal latency with the fastest ping and response times on Solana.
Elastic Nodes
With an elastic node, your DApp's calls are routed to our custom API gateway and then intelligently redirected  to our network of geographically distributed RPC nodes.
The core benefit of an elastic node is *reliability*
When your DApp makes RPC calls to Syndica, our API gateway analyzes them and forwards them to a node that’s optimized for that specific RPC method.
With elastic nodes, your DApp will experience similar ping and response times to a dedicated node while also maintaining an extra layer of redundancy. More precisely, our custom API gateway will never route your DApp’s RPC calls to a node that is slow, down, or at risk of failure
We have strategically built a global network of RPC nodes for our API gateway to intelligently communicate with. Meaning, even if the entire US power grid went down, we could still efficiently facilitate your DApp’s RPC calls.
Importantly, there is a slight trade-off between elastic and dedicated nodes:
DApps optimizing solely for speed benefit from *dedicated* nodes - think quant trading firms where milliseconds can make or break their competitive advantage.
DApps not solely optimizing for speed benefit more from the resilience of our *elastic* node network - think most DeFi and NFT DApps where an extra 20-30 milliseconds of latency won't affect user experience.
Regardless of your choice of node service, DApps using Syndica can scale by relying on 100% uptime and leveraging our advanced observability features.
