I've been advocating for infrastructure since day one. However, I'm not a fan of doing it this way. Seed nodes should be a shared responsibility of Hive witnesses. Not only those in top20, but also aspiring ones from top50 or so. It's great that you provide one, and in fact it's one of the reasons I'm voting for you.

But this proposal, rubs me the wrong way.

First about my PoV on seed nodes: you are running more than one public seed node. That's great, but running more of them doesn't really help the network that much. Sure, handful of healthy seed nodes are needed, and we should have few more, especially those that can act as "initial, default seed nodes". However, these should ideally be maintained by different independent entities. Otherwise such a redundancy serves little to no purpose for the platform, and doesn't meaningfully contribute to decentralization efforts.

(instead of funding this proposal, I encourage users to review their witness votes, and ask whether their witnesses provide public seed nodes. For example, Hive account@rishi556 does).

By the way, every hived connected to the network serves as p2p node and in many cases as a seed node, just not as mentioned "default, initial" one (for that a static address is required, preferably with own FQDN). I run plenty of these myself, and I know a few other witnesses / developers do as well. Thanks to the great core development efforts over time (kudos to Hive account@blocktrades and Hive account@thebeedevs teams), the hardware requirements for running consensus nodes (that is seed nodes, witness nodes, etc) have been drastically lowered, despite continuous growth of our chain. These improvements allow us to keep our hardware specs reasonable.

And reasonable is what this proposal lacks. The server itself is way, way, way overscaled for the claimed task. Seriously, it has at least 8x more CPU cores, 16x more RAM, and 2x more storage than a Hive seed node actually needs. I don't even use such powerful hardware for my public API node, not to mention my witness nodes.

I've featured my Hive consensus node setup that consumes 7W of power quite some time ago, and others have also written about efficiency, such as @themarkymark's take, and @borislavzlatanov's follow-up. Whenever there are witnesses, core developers, application builders, or even power users, then our p2p network will grow bigger and stronger organically, just by having them around.

Paying for such an overpowered server from DHF, one so powerful it wouldn't even notice a Hive seed node running on it, just isn't right.