as my experience bears out, most VPS providers seem to strangle the virtual machines in ways that makes them next to useless for running Steem nodes. The price in most services is massively dictated by memory, and it's only when you use memory as a disk that you can get these services to work properly. 16Gb is a minimum.

And there is no way apart from others reporting this, that you are going to find out which.

The VPS market is full of snakes and shysters, it seems, and if you are trying to get Steem to work on these hobbled virtual machines, you will have endless problems, like I did. For example, even, though it was synced up and had all the shared data supposedly generated, I could not get the RPC queries to work, no matter what I tried.

Now, on the new system that a trusted colleague has directed me to, not only is the RPC working - I can now broadcast transactions from it - it also isn't timing out in a matter of a minute or less and responding to commands with 'disconnected from RPC server' errors.

Admittedly, because the new VPS I am running has so damn much memory (50Gb), the whole thing is running from a ramdisk. Finding a VPS that either gives you real SSD speed, rather than limiting the rate of requests, or has enough memory at a price available to humans and low enough that self-hosting would be more expensive long-term, is very difficult.

Unfortunately I am not at liberty to disclose what my new provider is out of respect for the person who referred it to me. But if you are nice to me and have a reputation for playing straight, maybe sometime I will cough it up for you. I was actually referred to three separate providers, but I chose the one that had the most outstanding value for the amount of memory.

In any case it is better the more diverse the locations for witness servers the better, to defend the network against large scale regional outages, which happen from time to time especially when backbones go out, or fisherman catch themselves a nice big fat optic fibre cable in the Atlantic or Mediterranean or Indian ocean.

Example of commercial optic fibre connects that are in the range of reasonable

In fact, I have not done extensive research but business-grade (99.9% uptime) 100Mbit connections and faster are available in some countries at sensible prices. I don't want to make that claim without something to back it up, so here is Vivacom Bulgaria's business optical connections, and bear in mind that Vivacom is not the cheapest but they are probably the biggest and one of the best in Bulgaria:

https://www.vivacom.bg/bg/business/ceni-i-uslugi/internet/optichen

You probably can't read the Bulgarian on the page but you can see the prices. A gigabit connection in Bulgaria, per month from Vivacom will set you back 160 BGN (Leva) which are about half the value of Euros (it's on a peg). So €80/month for business grade gigabit optic fibre.

100Mbit will set you back €20...

I used to pay about equal to €80 for ADSL in Australia on a shoddy local loop that was endlessly being patched up from dodgy wiring corroding and getting waterlogged between my apartment and the exchange. The connection was having a good day if it sometimes gave me 16Mbit (about 2Mb/s). This was about 5 years ago.

Anyone who has talked to me recently may have heard me mention the idea of hosting a data centre myself, this is the kind of place and the kind of price I am talking about. You can see that pretty easily you could offer colocation services, have two such gigabit connections, and still offer a better service than most VPS providers, and with a backup connection and failover unit on the demarcation point where both connect, only a very large network failures are going to put you offline, with MPLS to join your connections, it's as good as anything Google or Microsoft would deploy their data centers in (In fact quite a number of major data centres are for this reason in Bulgaria and Romania).

...so you can see that I am not being unrealistic when I talk about setting up a small data center.

Keep in mind that not only is the network cheaper, the price of commercial property in Sofia, the most expensive in Bulgaria (the fibre is available in many other cities as well), is also much lower, I forget exactly what is typical but I seem to recall something like €8/sqm/month or so. This fibre connection can be installed in any location, there is no rule there about this being excluded from residential locations.

I'm not talking about something that isn't already happening. When I was in Bulgaria I personally met a guy who was manager for the support for Windows Activation, Office 365 and Office Activation, Microsoft's, probably main and biggest call centre. Hewlett Packard I almost got a job as System Administrator but after passing all the screening tests they went silent on me.

I almost want to publish this via the cli_wallet or steem-piston or something, since now I can do this on my own RPC server, but here I sit, sleepless late early thursday morning, I'm not quite up to that, I am just agape currently at the fact that steemd is actually working for me.

Stay safe out there!

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We can't code here! This is Whale country!

Vote #1 l0k1

_{Go to steemit.com/~witnesses to cast your vote by typing l0k1 into the text entry at the bottom of the leaderboard.}

_{(note, my username is spelled El Zero Kay One or Lima Zero Kilo One, all lower case)}