I explained in an earlier article briefly what RPC Nodes are, and how they are a crucial part of the Steem ecosystem.
Running an RPC node is quite expensive as the memory requirements grow, and currently costs at least $200 per month. Somebody has to do it though, if we're to have a responsive and resilient blockchain.
As well as Steemit Inc, several witnesses and a few others are also hosting RPC nodes for public use. Thanks to 
Please consider voting for witnesses running RPC nodes.
Following the recent DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on steemit.com (which had nothing directly to do with these RPC nodes), it occurred to me that it would be good to monitor some of the community infrastructure.
I have made a tool for monitoring responses from these servers every 15 minutes. It sends 7 different API requests to each, and measures the response times to my London server, and presents the results as an interactive scatter chart which shows the last 24 hours of data.
If you know of other public RPC nodes which aren't listed here, I'd be pleased to add them if you let me know.
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