I was under the impression that basically anything that isn't hosted on the cloud for Steem's blochchain was run by witnesses kind of? I know witnesses basically are the trusted servers that are verifying the blockchain and maintaining it, but I guess I somewhat understand why additional data centers would be needed.
Would the data centers maybe handle everything done by SMTs once that launch happens, since Steem will most likely get a lot of attention when that happens?
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Ok, I know it is a little confusing, but SteemDevs is a group that is not affiliated with Steemit.
We just program and provide services for users on the Steem blockchain. Now, we will definitely be supporting SMTs in our lessons and tutorials, and we will give users lessons about the inner workings of Steem. We will also teach people how to setup their Witness servers and provide one-on-one support.
With that being said, I am not talking about hosting the actual STEEM Blockchain in a datacenter. (However, as you mentioned, I may very well put a second, or third, witness server in the datacenter for redundancy.)
The call for the datacenter originates from our groups own needs. We host many services, several currently hosted via AWS, for ourselves or for other groups/users. Having a dedicated space in a datacenter will allow us to save a little bit of cost on this particular expenditure (hosting services for other people), however, it will add to our overall expenditures because rack space in a high available datacenter isnt cheap.
The reason for the physical servers is because we can reuse and repurpose them indefinitely. As we know that we will continue to use the hardware for the next 5+ years, we will save drastically over cloud hosting in the long run.
I hope this makes sense and helped cleared up some confusion
(Witnesses, as well as seed nodes, are necessary for the Steem blockchain to continue to operate in a decentralized fashion. Ideally, we want our witnesses and seed nodes on a wide range of different hosting providers so if one experiences catastrophic failure, the entire network does not die -- this means we must also strive to have servers in different regions too, because a hurricane in the south might cause immense damage to all servers hosted there or their ability to connect. Having backups in other regions helps prevent failure due to natural occurrences.)
No that definitely made sense. I think my misinterpretation of SteemDevs is what just threw me off! No it definitely makes sense why you all would want to have datacenters then, that would make things a lot simpler than how it sounds it is now.