IPFS Dedicated Gateways: Public vs Private

Learn about the differences between public and private IPFS gateways.

IPFS Gateways: Public vs Private

IPFS Gateways come in two forms: public and private.

Public Gateways

A public gateway can be used to retrieve any CID stored on IPFS and isn’t restricted to a specific CID or set of CIDs. Anyone in the world can use an IPFS public gateway to access files on IPFS. However, public gateways are often rate limited to help manage the gateway’s traffic in order to maintain the performance of the gateway.

Some public gateways are limited to serving content stored on the provider that hosts the gateway. For example, the Filebase Public IPFS gateway only serves CIDs that are pinned on the Filebase IPFS infrastructure. There are no restrictions on which CIDs stored on Filebase can be accessed using the Filebase Public gateway, and all CIDs stored on Filebase can be accessed using alternative public gateways, such as https://ipfs.io.

Attributes of Public Gateways

Unbranded

Public gateways are either unbranded like https://ipfs.io/, or their brand reflects the provider that hosts the gateway, such as https://ipfs.filebase.io/.

High Latency

Public gateways can experience high amounts of latency since they are often used simultaneously by thousands of users throughout the world. Most public gateways impose rate limits to manage and maintain this latency, but even with imposed rate limits the most popular gateways are significantly slower to retrieve content than private, dedicated gateways.

All Filebase users, free or paid, have access to using the Filebase IPFS Public Gateway.

Private Gateways

There are two different types of private IPFS gateways, dedicated or self-hosted. A dedicated gateway is often offered by an IPFS pinning provider which allows users to access CIDs using a private gateway URL. Dedicated gateways aren’t rate-limited and don’t require user configuration since they are maintained by the pinning provider that offers them.

In comparison, a self-hosted gateway is an IPFS node that is configured as an IPFS gateway and locally hosted. Self-hosted gateways don’t have rate limits like public gateways do, but they require user configuration and maintenance to remain online.

Attributes of Dedicated Gateways

Branded

When a dedicated gateway is created, it can be assigned a custom name. This makes the URL easier to remember, allows for easy branding of the project or company, and provides end users with an easily recognizable address.

Faster Performance

A dedicated gateway can be configured to serve only specific content, limiting the amount of traffic it receives. This makes the performance of a dedicated gateway much faster than the performance of public gateways that serve any CID.

Scope Configuration

Filebase dedicated gateways can be configured to only host a specific content identifier or CID. This ensures that users cannot use your gateway to host other CIDs on the IPFS network, reducing bandwidth costs.

You can learn more about how to use Filebase's dedicated gateways here:

pageIPFS Gateways

Please note that IPFS dedicated gateways are a paid feature and will require a paid Filebase IPFS subscription.

If you have any questions, please join our Discord server, or send us an email at hello@filebase.com

Last updated