As some of you know, many witnesses are starting to cease being a witness due to the server cost and the low price of STEEM. Our servers need to have more RAM available than is required to run the witness software and this pushes us into more and more expensive hardware.
This resource cost is even more of a problem for new work nodes, and there seems to be no fix in sight. At least from the standpoint of a sub 50 witness like myself. So I need to take measures into my own hands and find a way to make my hobby of witnessing more cost-effective.
If and when the price of STEEM is high, and on the moon, there is no problem paying a monthly fee since we can earn value from creating posts. When Steem was $4 USD, it only took 27.5 STEEM per month to pay for a 64GB server from 
That is a few days worth of blogging for me and is not hard to earn over the course of a month. Now that STEEM is much cheaper it takes a lot more saving to reach the same goal. To me, this is why many witnesses are dropping out of the game.
Like myself, they started up their witness server when the price of STEEM was high, and the cost of the servers was a bit lower than they are now. Then everything changed after the first of the year like it usually does in cryptocurrency and we get left out to dry.
I could always power down enough to end up with the needed amount of STEEM to meet the payment. However, since I have the goal to be a dolphin by the end of 2018 I would rather not. Powering down as much as I earn from witnessing is the other option but will not be enough on its own, since I receive less than one Steem Power a day.
To help combat the instability in the cryptocurrency scene I have chosen to build my commercial grade server in my home. I have the bandwidth and speed to do so without a hitch. Having a server in my house that I can expand the RAM with a one time purchase makes the most senses.
Buying A New Rig
I have a home server that mines Monero, runs the blockchain for Monero, hosts IPFS files, runs my Nextcloud instance, and is my VPN. It does a lot for the little machine it is, and I am more than happy with how it performs. I do plan to keep it for all of these tasks as well as other cool projects I may come across.
However, I am not able to run a Steem Witness on the hardware because the motherboard can not expand its RAM to above about 32GB. This server is it is not commercial grade hardware, and when I built the machine, I had no idea what Steem was let alone want to be a witness.
As mentioned above, I am now looking into commercial grade rack servers to place in my home. These servers need to be able to expand well into the future for the RAM required over the coming years. This stuff is not cheap, but I will have much more flexibility than I do now.
The Hardware
Here is the price of the hardware I plan to save for over the next few months. All prices are in USD, and I will have to cash out some STEEM to make this happen, but it's all for the good of the network!
- 1 x 6 Unit Server Housing: $60
- Extra 64GB of RAM: $200
- 1 x Dell PowerEdge R910: $650 (shipping included)
- Dell PowerEdge R910 includes:
- 4 x Intel Xenon X7550 (8 cores / 2.00GHz)
- 16 x 4GB PC3-10600R Ram (64GB Total)
Total Price With 128GB of RAM: $910 USD
Total Price With 256GB of RAM: $1390 USD
There are cheaper servers out there such as the Dell PowerEdge 810 but the big difference the amount of RAM it can use. The PowerEdge 910 has 64 slots for RAM with a maximum of 2TB that it can utilize. Whereas the 810 maxes out around 512GB of RAM.
Spending the money upfront for scaling is needed for this type of project. The cost seems a bit outrageous but all this server has to do is last me a year's time, and the price will be lower than renting a server.
That is even without the upgrade to 128GB of RAM with that upgrade cost and monthly payment this server will save me money in about six months worth of time. Sounds like the best bet for someone like me who loves this kind of stuff.
Here Goes Nothing...
Welp there you have it, the plan to move my witness server to a more sustainable solution for the tech-savvy, non-rich guy I am. If you want to help out and donate to this project, please let me know. I will be more than happy to work something out. Be it profit sharing or another means of thank you I'll be thrilled to know there are people out there looking to help keep the Steem blockchain decentralized.
Thanks For Reading!
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