Started looking into a number of blockchain providers including their service offerings and support. The support information, code and issues are in the references at the bottom. Here are the summary results.
Summary
There appears to be some bugs in the eth Ruby gem related to setting various gas prices and params. There have been issues reported as potential bugs in the eth repo. For this reason, it is hard to do performance analysis against the various blockchain providers; and of course it is not fair to any blockchain provider to annoy them regarding bugs in the eth gem.
On the other hand, two blockchain providers, Infura and Chainstack, have put some "skin into the game" and have attempted to work with the eth gem and help with errors and bug reporting. The Chainstack team actually posted a potential bug to the eth gem repo related to gas price calculations.
Alchemy never responded to my direct support ticket. QuickNode also did not provide any tangible eth gem support even though they click-baited me to their services with depreciated Ruby tutorials. GetBlock's endpoint method "error'ed out" of the analysis, as their endpoint would not work as all the others did.
So, my summary conclusion is as follows, in terms of my analysis of these blockchain providers vis-a-vis the Ruby eth gem.
- Chainstack
- Infura
The Winnners
Chainstack
Chainstack was a bit aggressive at first, trying to sell me $1600 USD a day service to debug "Hello World" but they quickly reversed and provided good service and support. Chainstack also submited a bug / issue report to the eth gem repo and provided very spot on support when I had a question. The main problem with Chainstack is they are not generous with developers and only provide a single free blockchain endpoint which forces developers to delete their node and create new different ones when testing. When we delete a node, Chainstack sends us an email which is an attempt to get us to sign up for paid services. Chainstack support did try to help and was heads and shoulders above every blockchain provider I tested with the exception of Infura.
Infura
Infura ranks high in this analysis because their support was good and their endpoints worked the most consistently. Infura also has a generous developer tier plan.
The Losers
QuickNode
QuickNode really disappointed. Google results for Ruby and blockchain providers point to QuickNode, but we quickly find that these Ruby eth gem tutorials are mostly click-bait. The tutorials are generally broken and / or depreciated. However some very trivial tutorials work; but one gets the impression these are mostly "copy-and-paste" tutorials from the net, copy-and-pasted for SEO, hence my negative term "click-bait". The straw which broke the camels back for me was when I asked for support for the eth gem, their replies were off-topic and they even responded with curl code, which was irrelevant to the Ruby gem (and potential gem issues).
Alchemy
Alchemy, like QuickNode, has a slick customer dashboard, but Alchemy never responded to my direct ticket requested support. Instead, Alchemy sends customers to a Discord community which was more of a troll, wannabe "schoolyard" community, which I quickly left. I am not a fan of the "community trolls" customer service model for customer support, but maybe I am too old-fashioned and prefer support to be helpful, not trollish.
GetBlock
I could not get GetBlocks endpoint to work. However, all the providers above, regardless of issues with support, at least their endpoints worked.
Postscript
It's hard to rank these losers. At least QuickNode tried to help and we can give QuickNode a pass for having so much click-bait SEO tutorials; but it would not be fair to Infura and Chainstack to rank QuickNode third.
It is also hard to rank Alchemy since their support model is to just send customers to a Discord community, which I found juvenile, and they did not respond to any support request.
One thing to mention is that when you Google for the "top 10" for these kind of providers, I have noticed that the reviews are just mostly "we have no idea what we are talking about" reviews. However, I have actually tested and interacted (or attempted to interact) with all the providers mentioned (except GetBlock) and have written a lot of Ruby code to test.
Unfortunately, there are some unresolved issues with the eth gem, and this has been a setback for my analysis on the one hand, but I did go deeper into the Ethereum rabbit hole that I thought I would. I may debug the eth gem deeper, or I may move on to a different flavor of blockchain analysis.
References:
HTH