# Real-time WebSocket infrastructure: an engineering guide

Engineering guide to real-time WebSocket infrastructure: protocol basics, architecture patterns, scaling challenges, and managed versus self-hosted trade-offs.

Canonical page: https://soketify.com/real-time-websocket-infrastructure · Last reviewed: 2026-08-21

## Frequently asked questions

### What is WebSocket infrastructure?

WebSocket infrastructure is the set of servers and coordination that keeps millions of long-lived, full-duplex TCP connections open and fans a message published on one node out to subscribers connected to every other node. It covers connection termination, a pub/sub backbone between nodes, sticky load balancing, TLS termination, health checks and failover, and per-application metrics.

### Why are WebSockets harder to scale than HTTP?

Because the connection is the state. An HTTP request ends in milliseconds and any server can take the next one, while a WebSocket occupies memory and a file descriptor on one specific node for hours. Scaling out therefore means every node has to learn about messages published on every other node, and losing a node disconnects everyone attached to it.

### Should I self-host WebSocket infrastructure or use a managed service?

Self-host when real-time delivery is your core product and you already staff on-call engineers for it. Use a managed service when it is a feature of your product, because the recurring cost is not the servers but the fan-out backbone, sticky routing, failover, secret rotation, and someone awake when a node dies at 3am.

### What is the Pusher protocol?

The Pusher protocol is a published WebSocket messaging protocol built around named channels, subscription authorization signed with an application secret, and JSON events. It is implemented by open-source client and server SDKs in every mainstream language, which is why it is portable between providers in a way proprietary real-time protocols are not.

## Routing, regions, reliability

- One endpoint for WebSocket traffic (ws.soketify.com) and one for the REST API
  (api.soketify.com). Clients are routed to the nearest healthy node
  automatically.
- Regions serving traffic today: US East, US West, EU Central.
- All clients of one app can exchange messages regardless of the region they
  connected from.
- Uptime target on paid plans is 99.99%. The Free plan carries no SLA and runs
  on the same infrastructure. Live and historical status: https://status.soketify.com.
- All traffic is encrypted in transit (WSS and HTTPS). For payloads the platform
  itself cannot read, use the protocol's encrypted channels.

## Secrets and limits

- An app can hold several secrets active at once, each labelled, so rotation is
  deploy-the-new-one, then revoke-the-old-one, with no downtime and no failed
  authorizations during the overlap.
- Plan limits cover concurrent connections, messages per month, number of apps,
  and maximum event payload size.
- Crossing a limit sends a notification at 80% and at 100% and starts a grace
  period. Connections are not cut, messages are not dropped, and no overage is
  invoiced.

## What Soketify is

Soketify is managed WebSocket infrastructure sold as a service. It implements the
Pusher Channels protocol, so applications talk to it with the official Pusher
client and server SDKs, unmodified. It is used for chat, live dashboards,
presence and collaboration cursors, multiplayer state, streaming AI responses,
and push notifications inside web and mobile apps.

## What Soketify is not

- Not a message queue or a durable log. Messages are delivered to subscribers
  connected at the moment of publication and are never stored. A client that was
  offline does not receive them on reconnect. This matches Pusher's behavior.
- Not self-hostable. It is a managed service by design; there is no on-premises
  or open-source distribution to install.
- Not a Pusher reseller or proxy. It is an independent service that implements
  the same published protocol, and is not affiliated with Pusher.
- Not region-pinned. There is no cluster to choose and no per-region app to
  create, unlike providers whose clusters are isolated from each other.