And here I go. I said I wasn't going to comment, but since you asked . . . 🙂
I think you'd need to have an extremely high degree of confidence in that small data center - at the end of the day, it's still a third party you have to depend on. With your home backup, you're looking good. Please, don't get me wrong, everything can still go wrong even if you've got it all on your own premises, but the more autonomous the witnesses are, and the more spread out they are, the less importance any one failure has to the entire ecosystem (and, of course, that failure is recognized, accounted for, and recovered from). The key idea I want to impress on everyone is that the more we are setup in that direction, the better, and the more we depend on "cloud" infrastructure, the worse. It sounds like you are somewhere in between, leaning towards complete autonomy - I even get the impression that you have a personal face-to-face relationship with that small data center (for those who don't know, don't laugh, I've worked personally with small data centers - they do exist).
Thanks for the question, but hopefully no more comments from me if I can help it. I really prefer to have more knowledgeable and expert people responding to these kinds of questions, if possible.
Sorry for pushing you to reply to my comment ;)
Yes I am depending on a third party and I would like not to, but unfortunately my internet connection is not all that good. If is failing regularly with complete outages of a few minutes.
To make HIVE more decentralized and for more witnesses to join, I guess a larger portion of the rewards would have to be payed out to the >20 witnesses. For me the decision to become a witness was not because of the rewards, but because I wanted to support the ecosystem (I will most probably never reach top 20 - I am happy if I am break-even at some point). However I guess that a lot of people think the opposite or don't have the opportunity to do so. Maybe an increasing value of HIVE would facilitate that.