Previously, I talked about my intention to become a witness. I quickly discovered that paying a hosting service for a virtual private server (VPS) was going to cost anywhere from $50 to about $270 per month.
That's okay for some people, but not for me: I've got two kids in college and a leaky old roof that needs significant repairs. On the other hand, I've got a small amount Ethereum. My wife has granted me use of this crypto "funny-money" for personal projects.
A word about the economics of this operation: I've been shopping around for a computer server to set up as a witness. In true Marxian fashion, I've decided it is better to spend my limited capital to own the means of production than to pay someone else for access to their equipment. Then, if I have a surplus, I can lease it to others to help cover the operating costs and possibly make a modest profit.
Now, we all know there's no shortage of competition in this area. How can a small minnow like me swim in the same waters as giants like AWS and Azure. Well, in a sense I'm not competing with them. My primary purpose is to operate as a witness and grow my participation in steemit and steem. My secondary purpose is to reduce my expenses. This means I'm going to operate the server from my home. I've researched and overcome a number of questions/problems. Here they are.
Can I use my home internet service? Yes. I pay a large monthly fee for high bandwidth internet access. I checked the rules, as a result of US government legislation, my service can't cap my total data consumption or charge extra for it.
Does running a witness consume a lot of bandwidth? No. Anecdotally, from listening to videos about mining bitcoin, it sounds like running a single node doesn't require much bandwidth.
Home internet service doesn't provide a static IP: Can a node work without a static IP? I'm not sure yet. However, there are services like noip.com and others who offer an inexpensive static IP address as a service.
Aren't servers more expensive than desktop computers? Surprisingly, no! I've discovered I can buy a powerful completely refurbished server with a guarantee, like a Dell PowerEdge R710 from http://stores.ebay.com/SaveMyServer for under a $200. By comparison, there's someone on my local craigslist who is selling a desktop computer with inferior specs for more than that.
What about power costs? Yeah. I'm not so sure about that. The worst case scenario I came up with was about $800/year, which I could manage.
What about electrical outages? That's definitely a problem where I live. I'm not sure what the impact might be on the rating of the witness node (missed blocks). It's very likely that an uncontrolled outage would damage the software and hardware. To address that, I'll definitely need an APC-UPS that triggers an orderly shutdown before it runs out of power.
I welcome your thoughts and comments.
