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Best Practices for Building High Performance VIDAs

Building a Verifiable Immutable Data Application (VIDA) that scales to millions of users while staying trust-minimised requires a slightly different mindset than traditional smart-contract or Web 2 engineering. Below is an opinionated, field-tested checklist you can follow when performance is mission-critical.

Configure web hosting without blowing the budget​

  • Start with "zero-ops" platforms—just know the trade-off.
    Services like Vercel or Railway are perfect for prototypes and light traffic, but the convenience premium stacks up once your site hits meaningful volume.

  • Graduate to raw cloud when you need granular control.
    AWS, GCP, Azure, and similar providers charge closer to commodity rates and expose knobs (autoscaling, spot instances, savings plans) you simply can't tweak on fully-managed platforms.

  • Read the bandwidth fine print—loss-leader tiers bite back.

    • A plan advertised as $20/mo for 1 TB + $0.20/GB after means your second TB costs $200.
    • If the pricing table ends with "Contact us", assume a big jump—budget or negotiate in advance.
    • High-traffic apps that serve un-cached images, video, or large JS bundles will punch through those cheap tiers in days.

  • Reference stack for cost-efficient production on AWS:

    • S3 + CloudFront - cheap, globally-cached static assets and SSL out of the box.
    • Lambda - pay-per-ms serverless functions; scales to zero when idle.
    • ECS Fargate or EKS - container orchestration without managing EC2 nodes.
    • RDS / Aurora Serverless v2 - relational data that auto-scales with load.

    This mix lets you dial resources up for traffic spikes and back down during lulls, keeping spend proportional to usage.

  • Protect yourself with budgets and alerts.
    Turn on AWS Cost Explorer, set per-service budgets, and configure e-mail/SNS alerts so any runaway spend is caught before the bill arrives.

Understand the Execution Model​

PWR Chain records what happened; your VIDA decides how to react.

  • No gas limits - complexity lives off-chain.
  • Predictable fees - users pay per byte, not per opcode.
  • Replayability - anyone can rebuild state from chain logs.

Design every feature with this mental split.

Pick the Right VIDA Flavor​

Stateless (fire-and-forget)​

  • What: Ignores history; acts on each tx once.
  • Use when: chat rooms, leaderboard pings, games where message loss is non-critical.
  • Why: Fast, minimal code.

Stateful (consensus on data)​

  • What: Replays all VIDA-tagged txs, maintains DB / root-hash.
  • Use when: money, supply-chain, audits.
  • Tips
    • Persist periodic state snapshots; include Merkle root in logs.
    • Cross-validate roots among instances or via Conduits.

Avoid unnecessary RPC calls to methods with static responses​

  • chainId always returns 0