GateHub isn't their platform, its an independent 3rd party which has built effectively built a portal between the ripple network and their own hosted crypto wal

GateHub isn't their platform, its an independent 3rd party which has built effectively built a portal between the ripple network and their own hosted crypto wallets(a Gateway). GateHub conforms to their(ripple's) API which makes it a "Gateway". I'll give you that gatehub's customer service is awful though, I only use them as way to check what my bot has been up to now. They have a test network now, idk about a year ago. The minimum account balance is there to keep you from opening a million accounts basically. Lastly I had trouble with their debug messages as well until I realized I wasn't reading them literally enough.