Yep! There are very few witness that own their own hardware (witness, seed, or RPC node, if they even have one) rather than rent it from a 3rd party. It's not a big talking point, but it has some interesting security implications. Akin to "not your keys not your coins", I'd argue "not your hardware not your data". And in this case, that data could be witness signing keys.

I've been scaling out and modifying my infrastructure quite a bit recently. A lot of applications have moved over to avoid reliance on Steemit -- I know Steemmonsters and Busy are two big examples. Further, in the Chinese community api.steemit.com seems to be actually blocked -- anyx.io is a portal to them.