The price of STEEM dropped hard after Steemfest.
I am paying for my single server with STEEM.
The monthly costs are eating all the profits.
I had to pay 345.749 STEEM for this month.
I only made ~160 STEEM this month through my witness.
That is not sustainable.
If I were to post every single day, I could probably cover the cost that way.
At the end of the day, the main profit would go to 
I have just renewed the contract and paid until christmas.
I am thinking about quitting the witness for good after that.
It started as an experiment, and I never wanted much responsibility, anyways.
I still have not looked into the new witness parameters, that came with the RC system.
I do not do code review and have to ask around, if I run into troubles with my server.
Being on constant alert and ready to react, if anything goes wrong with the server was easy with my previous job, but could prove to be tricky in the future.
Also, I am not good with politics.
Spectators, who go through the troubles of checking my transfer history, will see, how I used my witness income to support some good users and ideas here.
It was a pleasure and I hope it made an impact - I should have put more effort into marketing myself though.
I did not calculate the real numbers, but if I quit at the end of the year, I will still have a net profit left from this enterprise.
I have a hard week of work ahead of me, after which I will try to bang the drum a little more.
If I can get heavy votes, I can sustain the server, if not, I will have to abandon the witness.
Maybe, I got more votes than I ever should have gotten.
I still am amazed, how many people trust me with their votes.
To operate the witness at a profit with the current prices, I would need roughly twice as many votes.
I do not see this happen anytime soon.
I do not see many good reasons to support my witness.
There are others, who are far more productive and competent.
I have learned a lot and so far it was fun - Perhaps it will be the right time to quit.
For now, I have one month of signing blocks ahead of me.
After that, I would not mind going back to just posting and voting.
It would make a lot of things easier for me.
If you feel like it, please comment and tell me what you think about this.
Thanks,
@felixxx