was looking around for where I was going to put my witness after the current much overpriced service contract expired, and I found this: https://www.vpsserver.com/ I was like, "ok, this is cool..." Turned out the biggest setup available on this price was 2Gb memory and 4 cores with 80Gb of SSD storage. I thought to myself, "This might be enough to run a backup witness like mine!"

So I signed up, played around with configurations, tried a couple of things and eventually used the beefy 16Gb server I have to get an up to date blockchain_log and shared_memory files created, then tarred them up and transferred to the new VPS. I fired it up and lo and behold, after about 2 minutes very high CPU activity it started reporting catching newly printed blocks, and settled back down.

I was told that it should be fine for coping with the demand for queries when making blocks in a timely fashion, the latency and throughput on the shared memory file is very good compared to the other server, which is why it relied on a big memory buffer.

A key thing about the price of rented servers that I will point out here is this: The biggest cost is the memory. Then after that is CPU cores.

Steem's witness just needs fast disk access because the database is very large. Two cores is probably enough in most cases, and with SSD, 2Gb is enough but building the shared memory file needs to be done on another machine and imported. Even an old one is ok, it will just start up and first get up to date before being ready.

After I move to Novi Sad in the beginning of April, I will be looking into getting a 100Mbit business class (99.9%+ uptime) connection and running my own systems. I have a little fitlet I left with a friend in Sofia, I will get that back and it will run a beautiful RPC node, 120Gb mSATA SSD and 8Gb of 1600Mhz DDR3, quad core 2.1Ghz AMD A10 APU. I will also get something smaller to run my witness. If I can, I would much prefer to run the data center myself.

Anyway, so I will be paying the rent on this new VPS, given that it doesn't drop any blocks that come its way in the next few days.

Learning this technique also now I should have a fully operational seed node to announce shortly.

A last little note, it seems to me that at least at the beginning, an over-specced machine can be good because then you can work out exactly how much of capacity it needs for the uses.

Update

So far the new VPS is running the witness perfectly, it just got a block and made it just a little while ago.

I am re-purposing the big server that was the witness now as an RPC/seed node - and though mining will be over soon, I figure why not enable a PoW miner on it, maybe I will get a little more out of my money spent on it. I am just waiting for it to replay with all the wingdings turned on, it will take some time I expect, maybe not ready until tomorrow. When the seed appears to be working I will advertise it, it will be operational at least 2 months and I will rethink my configuration after the big server's lease is up. In the meantime I will have my own personally controlled RPC node and maybe it will mine me a few bux more while my main witness is doing backup-pay-level :)

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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)}