Oh right. I've been considering setting up a witness, but would only be interested in a full RPC node, as I'm doing development with RPC ( @steemreports).
Given that I'd need to do it remotely, so won't have access to the hardware, is there a suitable provider and server you could recommend? I getting the impression a VPS isn't going cut it for a number of reasons.
I'd very much appreciate any pointers.
Please note that a full RPC node and a witness node are two separate things and shouldn't be ever mixed.
As for VPS it might be viable as long as you have enough amount of dedicated resources (i.e. IOPS) guaranteed.
i3.2xlargeon AWS should do the thing.Performance might vary a lot between providers despite same parameters on labels, also you need to figure out yourself what would be more suitable and cost effective - more RAM or faster storage.
Thanks for this...
So if steemd is run with 'USE_FULL_WEB_NODE', it doesn't make blocks? or do you mean you just wouldn't broadcast your witness intent, because the node would not realistically have enough resources for both tasks?
So it's only running with 'USE_FULL_WEB_NODE' that has these challenging resource requirements, and if there's any problem, it's because the reward structure only pays for the blocks, and not RPC requests, hence the difficulty with economic incentives to provide the RPC nodes.
Am I on the right track now?
An architectural diagram or description of all this would be really helpful, otherwise I'm left continuing to guess about this, are there any links to these kind of resources?
For security reasons there should be no public rpc access to witness node. Witness node should not run anything other than it is required to generate blocks.
Full API nodes are not supposed to generate blocks, they are broadcasting transactions that witnesses include in the blockchain.
Using Steem platform is incentive good enough. Usually when you need full API node, then you already have some some project around it. If that's just a startup and usage is low, then it's fine to use public nodes (like my own). If such business grows enough that it needs own node(s) then it should be viable at that point to hire sysadmins and buy appropriate infrastructure.
Thank you - that makes sense. My understanding it improving now I think.