Properly Decentralising Steem & Cutting Costs by Witnesses running their own Servers & APIs

From reading Ned's post announcing 70% staff cuts at Steemit Inc, it is clear that infrastructure costs, particularly the ongoing costs of paying outsourced "cloud" providers for running full node servers supporting APIs are a big problem for Steemit Inc.
This is a problem that arises from centralisation and it can be solved by decentralisation!

It has always concerned me that in a supposedly decentralised environment so many witnesses and Steemit Inc itself were outsourcing to centralised companies running big server farms for the actual hardware that is powering decentralised blockchains like Steem.

There are three big problems with this:

1. Cost 1. It is far more costly in the long run to rent something from someone else than to own it yourself.
2. Cost 2. With outsourced "cloud" companies you are paying for density, reliability and redundancy that properly decentralised systems don't need.
3. Undermining Decentralisation: Use of out outsourced cloud servers creates centralisation that reduces the security and redundancy of the system.

@anyx has made a series of posts on these issues and has put his money where his mouth is and created his own gold standard 512Gb Xeon server running a full node with APIs: https://anyx.io.

https://steempeak.com/steem/@anyx/what-makes-a-dapp-a-dapp
https://steempeak.com/steem/@anyx/fully-decentralizing-dapps
https://steempeak.com/steem/@anyx/announcing-https-anyx-io-a-public-high-performance-full-api

However, as @anyx notes, it is possible to create a witness server running some APIs or a node running lots a APIs using a 128Gb server based on relatively inexpensive High End Desktop (HEDT) systems costing less than $2000.