RE: jesta witness update (2018-Q3)
Now you just need another switch and router but in a lot of instances, that is overkill, especially if you have other sites for DR. You do have plenty of room for expansion though, now you can lease a couple of U's to some of the other witnesses, or drop some of your EOS gear in there as well.
A trick I learned, completely configure everything, routers, switches, servers, storage, before going to the remote location. Much of the time you can get it all done, then just change the external on the router and be ready to go. (I know easier said than done.)
When you bring the witness back online about how long does it take to sync up? (just gathering intel and weighing some options.) I have a datacenter 2 miles from my house, I have some concerns about it. Mainly, they have just one pipe in and it's on the XO network, but they are working on getting two more from different regions. They will offer a 99.99% SLA but in a previous career, I received several days of free service.
I'm relatively new but from my perspective, you have a business to run. Unfortunately, politics do play a part in most businesses, but you have to do what is best for you and your business, whether others understand that or not. Investing time and resources in multiple blockchains is smart. If you were buying stock in a company, would anyone expect you to just buy stock in one company? No, and I don't really see a difference here. In my opinion, you are just diversifying your business to reduce risks. Just ask the people who are concerned about it, if the only cryptocurrency they own is Steem or SBD.
A full replay at this point probably takes somewhere between 3-5 hours (provided you're doing it all in RAM), which is just downloading a snapshot of the chain, then replaying it to rebuild the shared memory files.
The one concern about getting other witnesses is that it would end up centralizing things to some degree, but you're right, I could probably host a few backup nodes for other witnesses in case of emergency. I do plan on dropping some other block production resources on the other server (EOS as one, probably Decent/Muse/etc in the future).
A very good point - the hard part is that being a witness is a completely unknown business model, with currently EOS leading the pack on that grand experiment. It is a business that has to be run, so hedging bets is a great move, but without an actual product/customers the business is completely depending on the DPoS votes and the political process.
The conversations we've been having while building Greymass have been incredibly interesting in this regard. As an organization, we're completely reliant upon the stakeholders, which almost makes it more like a political party/organization. However it's run more like a software company on the inside in order to run the infrastructure and create the products that the community is in need of.
What an exciting time to be involved in this space. It's uncharted territory and we're all a part of it, figuring out how best to move through the space.