For a long time, picking a Solana RPC provider was a one-line decision: pick the cheapest endpoint that didn't fall over. The interesting question was whether you could afford a dedicated node or had to live on shared infrastructure. That world is mostly gone. In 2026, "Solana RPC" usually means a stack of five things that used to be distinct products. Plain JSON-RPC is the floor. On top of it sit WebSocket subscriptions, Yellowstone-style gRPC streams, shred-level feeds tapped before validators finish execution, and staked transaction submission with SWQoS routing. Most of the providers below offer some subset. A few offer all of them. At least two of the names you keep seeing on these lists don't really play the same game anymore. What to Actually Benchmark Reading a provider's website is not benchmarking. Five things worth putting on a real test rig from your own infrastructure before signing anything: p99 latency on the methods your app actually calls. Average latency is marketing.…