ELSOUL LABO

ELSOUL LABO is the fastest Solana RPC provider dedicated to advancing blockchain technology and open-source software. Their core business domains include Solana blockchain infrastructure, open-source software development, and DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) initiatives. 

By synergizing these areas, they enhance blockchain infrastructure, drive global innovation, and foster knowledge-sharing within DAO communities. ELSOUL LABO’s community-driven initiatives continuously refine their products and services, empowering them to provide tailored services that meet diverse user needs effectively.

The challenge

Solana continues to grow rapidly as the fastest L1 blockchain today, which also comes with very high hardware requirements. Performance directly affects profitability; hence, our users continuously demand high-performance nodes capable of delivering optimal results. Meeting these needs involves running extremely powerful CPUs consistently at turbo frequencies and optimizing network infrastructure specifically for Solana. Without fulfilling these conditions, user satisfaction becomes impossible to maintain.

Most hyper-scale cloud providers have been operating for a long time, and due to their hardware replacement cycles, they cannot meet the high-performance specifications Solana requires. Additionally, many prefer to sell more profitable virtualized environments, allowing them to offer more CPU cores than are physically available. This inevitably compromises actual performance from a user's perspective, directly contradicting Solana's operational policy, which demands uncompromised performance.

As we require top-tier performance, virtualization is not acceptable for our needs. Furthermore, even the bare metal offerings from hyper-scale cloud providers are often inexplicably virtualized or, when genuinely bare metal, use outdated CPUs that fall short of Solana's strict requirements. Similar issues extend to network infrastructure, making it extremely difficult to achieve the necessary performance. 

Although there are some specialized cloud services dedicated to Solana workloads, they typically come at extremely high costs and still offer limited performance.

The solution 

We decided to opt for bare metal dedicated cloud servers due to their premium performance. When choosing, we explored multiple data centers and bare metal cloud providers, but only a few vendors could meet these requirements. Cherry Servers stood out for its exceptional service quality and highly cooperative team, making them an ideal choice for our needs, as in many cases, building infrastructure configurations capable of meeting such demanding performance standards is challenging. 

We chose Cherry Server’s dedicated servers and operate the latest generation of high-performance AMD CPUs at maximum performance settings. Cherry Servers has consistently been cooperative in performance testing, proactively sharing new insights, enabling us to continuously optimize our environment effectively.

Additionally, Cherry Servers has supported ERPC's Startup Program, providing test environments for Web3 and Solana startups, making them an excellent partner in fostering innovation for the new digital era.

After evaluating virtually every conceivable provider, Cherry Servers has consistently stood out due to its exceptional quality and high customer satisfaction. We would also like to emphasize the outstanding support quality and highly cooperative attitude provided by the Cherry Servers team, which contributed significantly to our positive experience.

The result

Cherry Servers has consistently supported us in optimizing our infrastructure performance. As a result, our average latency improved dramatically—from an already industry-leading 30 ms down to just 5 ms.

We would absolutely recommend Cherry Servers to other companies, with the three top reasons being: highly transparent and user-centric services, dedicated and goal-oriented customer support, and excellent overall coordination and team collaboration.

These factors are crucial when selecting a bare-metal provider, yet typically challenging to find. Cherry Servers consistently excels in these areas, making them highly recommendable.