"I firmly believe that all the resources we currently have available that are not dealing with mission critical issues should be immediately directed towards this urgent task of getting our witnesses set up on independently owned servers to which those witnesses have PHYSICAL ACCESS"
That doesn't make much sense.
There are pros and cons related to running a witness node "on-premises".
In most cases, for a top witness, running a node that way is might be a bad idea.
Are you currently running your witness node on hardware you personally own and have physical access to?
Yes. No. Maybe.
I have variety of nodes (some of them are witness capable, i.e. backup witness nodes):
I own them, I lease them, I rent them, I have them on-premises, I have them collocated in data centers, in some cases I have direct physical access, in some cases I can have a physical access with some time and effort, and in some cases I can't even get close to them.
My current scenarios:
| Owned | On-premises | Physical access |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 0 | 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
None of my witness nodes run on AWS, GCP, or Azure (but it's nothing wrong to run them there).
And I don't touch Alibaba Cloud even with a poop-stick.
RE: Zero HIVE