This Is My Witness Application!

Hello, my name is Matt Lundstrom and my witness name is "glowhost-matt". I'm fully aware of the privacy implications of using my actual identity as a witness instead of anonymity. The reason for this may become evident as you read my application. That being said, I aspire to be a top 40 witness within the next several months (hopefully sooner) and I hope you will help me get there. You can do that by voting for me using the witness voting instructions at the end of this post...

Steem Beginnings:
My original contribution to the Steem network was under a different username, purchasing SP on an exchange as an addition to my existing crypto asset investment portfolio. At the time of the original writing of this post, my portfolio consisted of over 35 different cyryto-assets, one of them being Steem Power which I had purchased roughly 100 units, at around a buck a piece. When Steem Power got close to $7.00 or $8.00 I started paying closer attention to how the labyrinth of steemit.com works. I asked myself, "Where does this sorcery called Steem Power came from?" So, I did some digging and found out. As it turned out, I needed a Witness Server...and if I had one, I could make my own Steem Power, MAYBE.

So, I tried to make one, because that's how I earn my living. I make things on the Internet. Sometimes the things I make on the Internet are less important than others. Sort of like this picture:

Fig. 1

My Witness Journey:
When I first started down the Steem rabbit hole (Fig. 1), I decided to create a witness server to see if it could be done without super specialized hardware. So I started tinkering with virtual machines of ever-greater sizes. The original documents that I read said that 8 gigs of RAM would be enough to build a witness. That experiment failed! It failed because I didn't spend a lot of time researching what the current requirements were. As of this writing, a Steem Witness needs 32 gigs of RAM to load itself without a lot of tinkering. I eventually bit the bullet and fired up a 32GB machine and got things running.

For those future "would-be" witnesses, do your homework before investing in hardware. Oh, and before investing in any hardware, know that being a witness is not just about having powerful hardware, you are going to have to put in a large bit of work in the Steemit community in order to actually generate any Steem Power. Do some research here, there are plenty of good posts on what it requires to be successful as a witness.

The good news is Steemit.com has an excellent support community comprised of 'paid-volunteers,' and if it were not for those volunteers, my personal witness project and probably the entire Steemit project itself might not be here today. The community here is incredibly diverse and amazing. There are so many interesting twists and turns and corners and projects and investment opportunities, and, and, and, and...

Now, during my personal witness endeavor, a light went on. I decided that I did not want to be just another witness, I wanted to give back in some way.

My contribution comes from my background in the web hosting space. I've decided to offer free technical support and/or monitoring service which is available ONLY to existing witnesses in the top 100 who seek additional support and uptime for their witness or other Steem nodes. I'm providing a team of free helpers to those nodes that are operating one-man-bands who wish to preserve and protect their earnings.

Background:
I am someone who understands servers and their owner's needs very well. In fact, I started my first hosting company back in 2002, and it still exists today. I've personally overseen the provisioning of thousands of servers and virtual machines and dealt with tens of thousands of faceless personalities and even "a few" face-to-face through the course of my near 20 year career as a web host. I've invented proprietary clustering and backup architectures for Linux servers from scratch. I have code or ideas that have been implemented into core Linux and popular control panel apps which are still in use today and will be for the foreseeable future. One of my most popular downloadable contributions to the web is Spam-O-Matic which is the most popular plug-in for the popular vBulletin forum software with over 24 million page views and over 4500 user-confirmed installations (the real number is closer to 10k) on vBulletin.org. The plugin stops forum bot spam before it ever gets seen by the public and has blocked multi-millions of spam posts..

Potential Weaknesses on the Steem Blockchain:
I've discovered that a significant portion of the current Witness pool lacks diversity. What I mean is that much (if not most) of the witness servers in existence right now come from a small variety of hosting companies, so small in fact that I've only counted three so far. One of those is known to have one of the crappiest networks in the industry. I have never heard of the other one but they have several nodes in the same building, probably the same rack. Then there is of course Privex who is a well known and popular figure around the Steemit witness circle with plenty of contributions to Steemit and the witness project among other important things.

My concern is that the vast majority of these witness servers are in the same geographical location(s). In other words, almost everything in the witness pool appears to be in a small handful of datacenters. This could have negative implications on the witness pool if suddenly many or most of the top 50-100 witnesses go dark due to a problem at a single datacenter, lets say due to a massive DDoS for example. Also of possible concern is if there were a problem with a hosting company that causes it to become insolvent, or a company just vanishes off the face of the Earth, goes on vacation, gets sick of replying, and etcetera.

Trust me, this happens regularly in this industry and I've seen hundreds of hosts do this over the years. I am in no way insinuating any hosts here are incompetent, well, except for the one with the crappy network. I am simply using my experience of what I have "witnessed" in my career to present the seemingly obvious but often overlooked possibility of widespread outages on the Steemit network..

Witnesses: Imagine that you are a top witness, and all of a sudden you are now missing blocks and cannot get reach anybody at your host, because they've flown the coup...that's a problem, a big one.

I believe that I have already helped the witness network by increasing the 'genetic' diversity of the witness pool by adding my own witness node which is running out of a central-USA based datacenter. Future diversity plans are to add backup nodes in different geo-separated datacenters.

I am able to further increase diversity of the witness pool as a whole because I am able to offer other witnesses the ability to obtain their own witnesses servers, seeds, backups servers or RPC nodes in any of my company's 18 worldwide datacenter footprints.

Future Contributions:
Aside from backup nodes, I also hope to open discussions about other problems and more importantly, solutions within the witness pool once I am more well-known in the community. Topics of value will include discussion on outdated witnesses, broken price feeds, better ranking opportunities for hard-working (or even JUST working) witnesses. If I get lucky, I might even have time to develop some scripts to help out.

My Donations and Contributions to the Witness Community:
And now the reason I decided to NOT go anonymous...It might not seem like a lot, but it's what I can help with right now.

I am offering 24/7/365 real-time technical support services directly from my support team at no charge for any existing witnesses in the top 100 who would like a backup or other node in one of our locations. In other words, we'll provision a fully managed, monitored and "watch it when you sleep to make sure it's up" node for the cost of an unmanaged server. My markup on unmanaged servers is exactly $10 USD. In other words, I'm giving the servers at my cost, plus $10 to cover incidentals. This is my primary donation to the Steem community.

I know that a certain trust must be involved with letting 'just anyone' help manage your witness node and the sensitive keys it contains. Without identifying myself, and my company and it's reputation, I'd not be able to reasonably make this offer. We regularly handle sensitive information like credit card numbers, private keys for anything from SSL to PGP encrypted email, and private healthcare information for HIPAA. I've forgone my anonymity and perhaps future personal safety (should I someday end up a whale), to help out Steemit. This is my secondary donation to the Steem community.

Learn more about managed witness servers.

Summary:
I am hoping the Steemit community can vote my witness into a position where it makes financial sense to maintain it. My value added to the technical, uptime, support and documentation side of Steemit should make me one of the most valuable assets on the Steemit network. My background as a long time and trusted managed service provider, the diversity my current and future witness nodes will bring to the witness network, and my ongoing witness support services are good reasons that you’ll vote for me as one of your preferred witnesses, right?!?

Thank you for taking the time to read my witness statement and application.

Will you be so kind as to vote for me?

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If you liked this, please vote for me as a witness. Witness votes are different than regular votes.

A witness helps to power the Steem blockchain, which is one of the critical components which makes steemit.com work. Without witnesses, there is no Steem blockchain and no steemit.com. Witnesses contribute servers, bandwidth, electricity, their time and technical support among other things, at their own expense. By voting for a witness, you help offset these costs.

Here's how to vote for me:
Just go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses. At the very bottom of the page you will see something like this:

Simply type "glowhost-matt" into the box, and click the vote button.