This is really good to hear and I never had any doubt that Privex would do its utmost to prevent censorship of Hive posts.
I think the Privex does an amazing job and full appreciate all the support they give to the Hive community.
However the point remains that even with all the best efforts, any point of centralisation is vulnerable. Also companies providing data center services are vulnerable because they are easily identifiable.
Hive is pretty under the radar at the moment but if Hive ever achieves the large scale adoption that we all want to see, enemies of freedom will start attacking all vulnerabilities.
It is almost impossible for governments to stop a blockchain that is fully decentralised across thousands of nodes run by individual people in their homes all across the world.
However if they only need to take down an handful of identifiable companies with fixed facilities then they will find a way. Even in Belize.
Also if the owners of a data center company are in the USA or a jurisdiction with easy extradition to the US then it can be a problem, as Bitmex recently found out.
This is why the ability to run a witness node (and hopefully soon an API node) on a Windows Home PC is so important.
We need to have thousands of active witnesses and hundreds of API nodes to be fully secure and decentralised.
The Hive Devs have done amazing work reducing the resource requirements to run a Hive node to the point where this is possible.
Now we as a community need to take this opportunity to more fully decentralise.
This is why I'm running a witness on a Windows Home PC - to prove that it can be done and can be reliable.
I appreciate the enthusiasm.
I had my pricefeed and other scripts running at home, while the witness was in a data center. This was, because I thought I needed a static IP for my node - that does not seem to be the case (?). I had noone to ask back then.
For a full API node (I would recommend a seed node first) you would need a fixed IP or at least a fixed adress to route to your node from, because otherwise people will not find your node - and then what would be the point of it ?
Running these things from home might sound and feel easy at first, but after 2 years and hundreds of missed blocks, I gave up.
If you stick with your plan, I can recommend looking into a router, that lets you also plug in a SIM to fall back on, in case of network problems.
What about uninterrupted power supply ?
In case you are on the road, you want ssh access to your servers anyways, because things always go wrong, when you are not at home ...
I will vote for you later on, but I believe you will migrate your setup once you come to your senses :D
There are other options than privex and you do not seem to need their privacy, which is why I chose them, back then.
Thanks for your advice and suggestions.
It is a lot easier to run a Hive node at home post HF24.
Snapshots mean that one can have your node running again after a reboot in less than 15 minutes, rather than having to replay for days.
I plan to run a seed / backup witness node as well quite soon, which will allow almost instant changeover in case on main node going offline. I have heaps of quite decent PCs parts lying around from GPU mining days.
I have very good internet with fibre to my desk and look at these download and upload speeds - Way better than most data centres provide for basic customers.
I have a 4G USB modem that can provide backup internet access but I also can access my friendly neighbour's wifi to provide network redundancy.
Power outages are extremely rare but with HF24 you can run a backup witness on a laptop with 8Gb RAM at a pinch and easily with 16Gb RAM. The laptop can get internet access over the 4G Modem if the whole apartment complex was to lose power so that neighbour wifi wasn't available.
I work from home and rarely go anywhere these days with COVID and 5 kids including 3 little ones (actually they are the main threat to be defended against).
So you see, I've considered all the things that a data center provides and realised that I have better everything at home, for free.
I also note that you are voting for a @liberosist who has been a dead witness for over a year. Maybe you can give me that vote.:-)