For those who need greater speed or increased rate limits when retrieving content, Pinata lets users on our picnic plan create dedicated gateways.

What are the benefits of a dedicated gateway?

To get started, you'll need to sign up for the Picnic Plan. From there, you can go to our Gateways page to create your first gateway.

If you have signed up for a Picnic Plan a Dedicated Gateway should already be created for you automatically! Simply visit the Gateways

If you don't have a gateway or want to make an additional gateway, simply click on the "Create Gateway" button in the top right! You'll be prompted to create your gateway through an easy-to-use wizard.

What's the difference between an open gateway and a restricted gateway? A restricted gateway will only load content that is on your Pinata account! This is done by default for security reasons.

If you need a gateway that can access content outside your account, say for an NFT marketplace, please visit the Gateway Access Controls page of our docs to open up your gateway!

Bandwidth is the data that represents the item you or your users are viewing through your dedicated gateway. Each image, video, audio, and any other type of file that is displayed through the gateway or downloaded through the gateway is made of up data. That data is sent from an IPFS node to your computer. The size of this data is bandwidth.

You can track your bandwidth for any gateway you have set up by going to your Gateways page and clicking on the subdomain link for your gateway.

To view content through your gateway, grab the CID of the file you'd like to view and add it to your gateway URL like this:

https://<Your Gateway Subdomain>.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/<Your CID>

Simple as that!

In many cases, projects will directly put an entire gateway url on chain (such as when minting NFTs).

If you find yourself reading from a location that may provide a gateway URL, Pinata created the ipfs-gateway-tools toolkit to help you out.

This toolkit can easily convert any standard IPFS gateway url, as well as URIs with the ipfs://<CID> format to a URL that utilizes your gateway.

Pinata also allows you to create a custom domain for your dedicated gateway. Simple click the menu button on the right side of your gateway row in the table on the Gateways page, then click Add Custom Domain. You'll need to own the domain you want to use. When you enter your domain, you will be prompted to enter DNS information through your registrar.