Of course you can see logs from anywhere in the world, just as you can do Zoom calls with anyone in the world but my point was not about efficiency.

My point was about physicality, commitment, and the "in-your-face" rather than "out of sight and out of mind" aspect.

You are right that a lot of witnesses just set and forget and some don't even notice they are missing blocks for days or weeks.

It is precisely because they are using far away rented servers that they have less commitment and interest in learning witness skills than if the witness node was living with them.

I keep my own backups of block_log and do my own snapshots which I can transfer to whichever Hive node needs them over my Gigabit Ethernet LAN. Even the 330Gb block_log only takes less than one hour to transfer.

While I agree that the ability to replay is also important for hard-forks and emergency patches, replay speed is NOT about internet connection or where a node is located.

Its about single core CPU performance, RAM and I/O speed.

The fact is that the machine I specced above will beat 90% of servers in those factors.

In particular, server CPUs generally have a large number of cores but relatively poor single thread performance. High end desktop and gaming PCs by contrast generally have fewer cores but much better single thread CPU performance.

Regarding knowledge: if you want more people to have it then more effort needs to be made to spread it.

While I have got great assistance from people like @someguy123, @deathwing and @rishi556 the availability and accessibility of documentation on running Hive nodes is quite poor and out of date.

This is something that really needs to be remedied. There needs to be an Idiots Guide accessible on all major front-ends and hive.io.