I fully agree on having them run by multiple entities and try to encourage others to run nodes as well. If anyone else wants help running one please ask, I will help you out.

As for reasonableness, this was the best I can see for putting in a data center. I know it looks overspec'd at first glance. I thought the same too, but it's the best I can find within a "reasonable" budget. I need something with remote management and something that's reliable long term. From past experience, I've found that spending a bit more to get something reliable is worth it for colocating hardware, since the labor costs add up quick if you can't go in to do the work yourself(and sadly I live a flight away from NYC to be able to visit for fixing issues). Dells have been the most reliable hardware I've used so I went with them. Got plenty of broken gear from other brands, but none of my Dell servers have given me problems yet(knock on wood 🤞). The CPU was chosen for it's higher frequency compared to the other options. Sure it has more cores, but I've noticed faster sync times with faster frequency and I plan on keeping this around for as long as it's reasonable so spending a extra few bucks now for any future needs seems worthwhile to me. Upgrading in the future will cost more than getting higher performance now. I've also had enough used RAM fail on me that I've decided to overspec and trash out falty sticks. It's a lot easier & cheaper to ask the DC to take out half the sticks and see if it boots back up and swap the half taken out if it doesn't than working with them to narrow down which is the faulty stick. Same thing on the drives, while it has more than necessary, it's again cheaper long term to just disable the drives that die than replacing. When work is $300/hour with 1 hour minimum, I'd like to be able to fix things without needing to involve DC techs. As for why I keep my nodes in datacenters, my home network has a upload cap of 20mbps and I'd like to keep as much of that for my usage than machines.

Long term, this node will be up there, just later if this proposal doesn't get funded. I use Hive enough that I want it running and I'll play my part on keeping it running.