@reggaemuffin witness server update

Hey folks,

at some point I just need to make a cut and do a new update. Here is what I am up to lately:

The welcoming contest is going really well. That contest took months of planning and I am glad that my idea + 500 STEEM are in good hands with Hive account@inquiringtimes!

My witness server and my seed node are both running with 32GB of RAM and with the steem usage rising I took the time to switch to a 64GB witness server. So my old 32GB server will keep online as a backup server. With me being almost in the top 50 (currently place 56 after a tough ride) I have more funds available to setup a good witness. Expect me to expand that network once I rise higher in the ranks.

I used this opportunity to adapt my witness parameters. I tuned down account creation cost, as the steem price rises, accounts need to be cheaper in steem amounts.

There were also many complaints about bandwidth limits the last days and I finally brought it up with the other witnesses. After some discussion, Hive account@timcliff made a post that summed up the issue pretty good. I personally decided that my block size will be higher for the moment. And other witnesses are doing the same thing. It is a tradeoff between good first user experience and increasing the blockchain size.

My witness server is running smoothly and my seed node too. My servers are monitored and since now had no outages or missed blocks.

The buildteam rpc node will get a second server and Hive account@themarkymark is working hard on bringing that one up. Our node is the fastest in response time as shown by the rpc node monitor. And since people notice that, we are spinning up a second server to keep it that way.

I plan to review the source code of new hard forks and help with testing the test net. As Hive account@ned put it, this is one of the things we need more witnesses doing and I can brush up on my C++ skills that way.

Since I am currently writing on my bachelor thesis, I will have to cut down on helping users a bit. Over the last months I encouraged and supported many users in helping their fellow new steemians. I will continue to support them on a high level but will have to cut down on the amount of private messages that I receive from users asking for immediate help.

My current witness votes are pretty stable and am quite happy with my selection. Suggestions are welcome but since I am on 30 votes now, it is a question on who raises the bar. My witness vote does not count for much but I intend to vote for witnesses who support the network.

I am now in spot 56 and slowly climbing. I lost a few big votes from people who disagree with me and this is a good thing. It shows that people care about their votes and I hope that my supporters vote for me, because they support what I do. I got some unvotes because of MinnowBooster and that is probably something I have to accept. I am encouraging the community to hold discussions on voting bots and how to deal with them. Just saying that it is bad won't get the network anywhere, we need discussion and improvements. And as long as no one is stepping up, MinnowBooster will be the better bot of the lot.

To support me, vote for Hive account@reggaemuffin as a witness: