Witness updates - My journey to become a Steem witness and other updates

As a backup witness currently at number 310 with only 16 votes means I still have a lot of work to do to get to the top 100. A few things I have done since my witness server went live is to upgrade my servers from a 32GB memory to 48GB memory because we are almost at 30GB and is just a matter to time. Here is my current specs 

• MEMORY : 48 GB
• vCPUs : 12 
• SSD DISK : 960 GB
• TRANSFER : 8 TB

compared to what I started with which you can find here  ( https://steemit.com/witness-category/@yensesa/vote-for-yensesa-as-the-new-backup-witness-from-ghana-africa )

I have also reached out @accra for their support and a few other active Steemians. I have a lot more reach-outs to do if I want to get to the top 100. 

Challenges

Currently my challenges have not been that much

1. I am using this script by @someguy123 (https://steemit.com/witness-category/@someguy123/steemfeed-js-a-nodejs-price-feed-for-witneses) for my price feed update. But for some wired reason, it keeps crushing from time to time, so I need to be monitoring and making sure that I occasionally restart it. A much more scalable way is;

1. I find a different script 
2. Write my own script 
3. Write a bash script to automate the restart. 

If you are a witness, can you share what you are using or doing ... This is the type of error I get from time to time 

 SteemApi error: get_required_signatures [ { ref_block_num: 0,  ref_block_prefix: 0,  expiration: '1970-01-01T00:00:00',  operations: [ [Object] ],  extensions: [],  signatures: [] },  [ 'STMXXXXX' ] ] {} (node:17) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection (rejection id: 10): Error: SteemApi error:get_required_signatures[objectObject],STM61tB8cPTWUc4G5zTWzRM51VqnKQdmijpDdqkQsRcYbrbkffWAa{} 

2. Getting votes I think will be one of the most difficult things. Other witnesses have repeatedly blog about ways they are doing it. I am going to follow some of their methods, come up with my own crazy ideas and see how those work out. 

Conclusion 

All in all I will say it has not been a bad experience, as I am learning a lot during this journey. Thank you and kindly remember to vote for @yensesa as a witness. I will keep posting my journey.

In order to vote for us you can go to:https://steemit.com/~witnesses  and enter  "yensesa" into the account text field and click vote. Or use steem-connect to vote directly for us as Steem witness!