Wait... What?..You only made how much STEEM?
Personally I am in a unique place. I just happen to own a small hosting company and I have spare hi-end servers that I am no longer using because I have condensed my hosting footprint by using virtualization software. I also pay for a specific set amount of power and bandwidth each month. That price does not vary as long as I don't go over my peak points. So I can re-purpose old servers for Witness and Seed nodes and my hosting fees are not going to change.
I made this post because my witness mentor, @yehey posted something in the witness chat on Discord that got me thinking about the question, Can I Really Afford To Be A Witness for STEEMit?"*
@yehey suggested the following;
@Yehey [ Witness ] - 01/23/2018
For your information before you buy your first witness server.
Some questions to ask yourself first because this involve losing $$$ every month.
Can you afford to lose $$$ every month being a new witness?
Can you get more votes, especially Whales to support your Witness Campaign?
Can you manage your own witness server?
I guess those three are the obvious reasons.
You need to be in Top 50 so you can pay for your witness servers.
Of course you can setup your witness server, see the pinned post for step-by-step procedures. And if you have any questions, please post to #witness thread
Here's the link of witnesses https://steemian.info/witnesses
I hope that will help your decision.
Right now neither @yehey nor myself are making any money when you consider the cost of hosting and the time invested. Good thing for me it's not costing me any money either.
As you can see below both of us are outside the top 80 witnesses in Steemit. Lots of room to grow.
If you are renting a VPS from @Privex Hosting offered by @Someguy123 (recommended hosting), then you are going to just about break even as long as $STEEM remains around $2.50 to $3.00, as far as a finacial investment goes.
You also must invest yourself
You also need to factor in the time and knowledge or at least the time to gain the knowledge it is going to take to make sure your node stays up to date with security patches like the one we had released last week, and the changes that will come with upcoming hard forks as they are released.
It is a lot of work even for those of us that have a good grasp of what we are doing. For a novice hacker it is going to be a huge learning curve even with wonderful witness and Seed guides like the ones @yehey has provided.
But that is not all
As a witness you are expected to also be in some fashion a contributor to the community. What do you bring to the table as a witness? Are you a political advocate ready to sit in on all the STEEMit Forums hosted by @Jesta and @Aggroed and make a valid contribution to the dialogue? Or do you have talents that are going to help evolve the application or bring new applications to the community.
| @Arcange gives us STEEMSQL, a tool that provides a SQL interface to the active STEEM Blockchain. This commitment requires a STEEM RPC node. That is a pretty hefty investment. | 
|
Only recently did @Arcange start asking for a subscription to the steemSQL service. Fair enough if you knew the cost to provide a resource intensive service like this.
Other witnesses's have provided projects like the STEEMd site brought to you by @Roadscape, or the steemian.info site (screen cap seen above) provided by @Drakos, This is an invaluable tool for witnesses. Another one that I find myself visiting an awful lot is the Potential Rewards site created by @Dragosroua.
@yabapmatt gives us the STEEM Bot Tacker. If you use voting bots this tool cannot be one that is overlooked.
As well you have front end developers like the chrome and Firefox plugin developed by @Armandocat
Another great tool is Steem World by @Steemchiller. This tool is one of the best compilations of STEEM Blockchain data I have seen yet. Another useful tool called Vessel built by @Jesta. Vessel is a Steem Wallet in Desktop mode. It has other uses also like moving STEEM to and from https://bittrex.com exchange and openledger.
Another great witness is @JerryBanfield. Jerry is more like the STEEMit.com Evangelist. Jerry might remind you of an exuberant Joel Olsten preaching the wonders of STEEMit all around the world from his @Dtube pulpit. Jerry has taken a major portion of what he has earned on STEEMit and bought ads on Fascistbook and youtube to help spread the word about STEEMit.com.
Jerry is a giver. He so appreciates what STEEMit has given to him he cannot help himself but to give back. He even developed a @budgets plan for Witness's that are that are devoted to STEEMit but tragically failing to be able to afford to keep a witness server racked and running.
Jerry has opted to award STEEM Witnesses below an active rank of 80 with a 100 STEEM per month allowance. For most that still wont be enough to keep your VPS bill current but it is who @JerryBanfield is. If you have not been introduced to Jerry yet make sure you take the time to review some of his videos. He is an inspiration to many of us and how a lot of us found out about STEEMit.com
So be sure to ask yourself 1st, what can you bring to STEEM?
As you peruse your quest to run a witness server keep in mind STEEMit is not a cash cow. Particularly in the beginning its more like a money pit. If you don't bring your heart and your resolve along with a shit tonne of hours and cash you can devote to the community, your quest is not going to turn into vest.
Just my two STEEMS Worth.
Vote LibertyRanger as your Witness or Set Proxy.
Go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses URL address then scroll down to Vote.
Or you may simply follow this link and click the Continue button to confirm your vote.
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=libertyranger&approve=1
Please follow me @LibertyRanger, Vote Up and Resteem
Thank you,
@LibertyRanger
Go ranger. Very generous to call out the good guys
This is barely a good start too. I am going have to follow up as I left out a lot of the great witnesses and developers that are not witness's that have other projects and interfaces. @dtube @dlive @zappl @dsound @dmainia are all huge projects that have really increased the value of STEEMit but I totally neglected them in this post.
Oh there ain't no rest for the wicked......
This is a practical guide to all aspiring witnesses before ever spending their hard earned money on a servers.
Cheers,
@yehey
Thanks for the good word @yehey, I just want to thank YOU as without your particular guides I could not have completed my nodes. they are more concise than any of the others I have looked at to date. Thus that makes you my mentor. Great work you have done on those. And I like that you put them where they can be updated as STEEMit installs are obviously going to evolve as the infrastructure changes and the platform grows.
Thank you for this very informative post @libertyranger. Reading through this content definitely had an influence in my decision making process when I made my 30 witness votes last night. It actually inspired me to do a post about the importance of witness voting.
In fact, it was also the primary driver for me casting a vote for your witness mentor @yehey. You were very close to being in my top 30, but just missed out. Keep up your great work and keep posting useful content and you may slot into my top 30 in the coming days or weeks. Here is a link to my witness voting post if you are interested in having a read: Learning to Steemit #2: My 30 Witness Votes.
If you would like to provide any feedback on my post or any suggestions on any future research I should be doing on the topic of witness voting, that would be much appreciated.
Very glad to have had an influence on you and your post about voting for witnesses.
I am going to have to resteem that one.
Didn't know you ran a witness node...
I'll support the cause (when I'm on my pc at home) in the comming days. If I forget to do this before friday, pm me please!
I certainly do appreciate it. I have my seed running at home for another 5 days. I hope to have my new processors in by then and then can take it down to the colo and put it online on my main network.
And if the markets will recover, I jhave seen my portfolio decrease by 2/3s then I can afford to actually purchase a brand new Supermicro server to deploy as a full RPC node for public use.
I am really excited about that projext as I need access to the SQL API it offers because I have some really big plans for @dtube and @dlive with Roku streaming Television.
Keep doing what you're doing!
I just did the actual witness voting part :P
Hope it helps you gain some ranks!?
From a few days I read through all guides on the subject of "Witness" and found out that it takes a lot of effort and knowledge. I have been thinking about it and decided to try it sometime in the future, if I have grown up on the platform and have the necessary skills.
Without IT skills it is very difficult to give something tangible to the community. With programming, most top widnesses have achieved their position and gained the necessary reputation in the community. People without these abilities will have it much harder
It is going to take a bit of work but if you can get your hands on a decent powered machine at home you work with a node and at least learn the ins and outs. Without putting your hands on a machine and the Ubuntu OS and a copy of docker you will not progress in that area. Granted it is a significant investment if you are planning on being one of the many that are pioneers on STEEMit it is going to be something you want to pursue.
The topic Witness is really interesting and I will certainly deal with it more in the future, but at the moment I am lacking money for a suitable server, the knowhow to manage it and also the followers to collect votes to have only one single block within reach. But I will join one day for sure. Thank you for your answer.
Hello, please follow the rules of the group Steemit for Resteem ↕ and you will be resteemed by the most active members in the group.
You have to resteem someone from the group and pay 0.15 steem or steem dollar to clixmoney and then post in the group and you will be approved, upvoted by clixmoney with an upvote worth 0.15 and active members of the group, and resteemed by other members.
If you pay 0.75 steem or steem dollar you get all of that + my resteem to more than 3000 followers and you don't have to resteem anyone in this case.
The article showed me a different side of the Witnesses and I learned from it, thank you.
I read some of your comments about Facebook lol I love your 'spirit' against Facebook. same here.
I voted and wish you good luck.
Facebook is a death trap. Have you heard the axios interview of one of their past CEO's?
If not check this out https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-only-knows-what-its-doing-to-our-childrens-brains-1513306792-f855e7b4-4e99-4d60-8d51-2775559c2671.html I hope Facebook continues to push it's client base away. That Zuckerburg asshole is more dangerous than Adolph Hitler ever dreamed of being.
Thanks for your good information. really helps.
@originalworks
This post has received a 0.89 % upvote from @drotto thanks to: @libertyranger.
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Want to promote your posts too? Check out the Steem Bot Tracker website for more info. If you would like to support the development of @postpromoter and the bot tracker please vote for @yabapmatt for witness!
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Thank you... this needed to be said. I’m new here and take my witness voting seriously even if I don’t have much impact. I’ve voted for many you mentioned but will look at the rest. And yes, you e got my vote!
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I have purchase steem power with my Altcoins....
Is it worthy or i have wasted my altcoin?