"I firmly believe that all the resources we currently have available that are not dealing with mission critical issues should be immediately directed towards this urgent task of getting our witnesses set up on independently owned servers to which those witnesses have PHYSICAL ACCESS"
That doesn't make much sense.
There are pros and cons related to running a witness node "on-premises".
In most cases, for a top witness, running a node that way is might be a bad idea.
Are you currently running your witness node on hardware you personally own and have physical access to?
Yes. No. Maybe.
I have variety of nodes (some of them are witness capable, i.e. backup witness nodes):
I own them, I lease them, I rent them, I have them on-premises, I have them collocated in data centers, in some cases I have direct physical access, in some cases I can have a physical access with some time and effort, and in some cases I can't even get close to them.
My current scenarios:
| Owned | On-premises | Physical access |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 0 | 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 | 1 |
None of my witness nodes run on AWS, GCP, or Azure (but it's nothing wrong to run them there).
And I don't touch Alibaba Cloud even with a poop-stick.
Thank you for your reply. Yes, I agree with you, or should I say, the consensus agrees with you, that a "yes, no, maybe" mix of things is probably the ideal. It's also worth noting that you are still in the minority, which is to say the majority (of respondents) are operating out of data centers exclusively and a sizeable number are running "off the shelf" products from the same providers (as I note in my "report" which followed this post). That's where we need to direct "all the resources we currently have available" - obviously not literal in meaning, but my opinion is that our available "human" resources should be directed at getting the rest of the witnesses up to your level (or at blocktrade's or arcange's, both with similar setups to yours), and certainly get everyone more widely distributed across providers and geographical areas. This depends entirely upon adequate documentation and assistance, which takes time, effort and knowledge to put together and share, hence the call for a temporary and urgent "reallocation of resources", again, metaphorical - the only resources needed here are the human experts to document and share their expertise . . . but that means dropping the coding, the programing of the next game, next release, etc., while that documentation, let's say knowledge base, is built . . . hence, "all our available resources", because, for all intents and purposes, that's what it would end up feeling like . . . I would think . . . if it were to be done in the urgent manner that events seem to suggest it be done in.
(As for the physical access, that was the ideal assumption I began with - that's what would be my preference if I were a witness - however, respondents' replies opened my eyes to the benefits of a mix, for practical reasons more than anything.)