I'm happy to report that as of today, my witness node has been upgraded. The process went smoothly, with no missed blocks and no downtime whatsoever. It was also a good exercise for building and maintaining a backup node (which is something I intend to do, after I come back from SteemFest, next month). The new machine is a 16 cores Intel, with 72GB of RAM.

Until today I was running a bare metal machine form Hetzner, 32GB RAM and 8 cores Intel. I had nothing to complain about it, other than the fact that I already had 2 machines waiting to be allocated to the Steem project. The machines were installed in a collocation facility since last Monday, all I had to do was to configure them.

Having the machines in a colocation facility in my own town will make debugging and upgrading easier. 

The second machine - with the same configuration as the witness node, plus a 240 GB SSD drive - is allocated to the content node that I am building for [steem.supply](http://steem.supply) and is now my first priority, hoping to get it done next week. In theory, this should bring the downtime of steem.supply close to zero.

Since I am already playing with the Steem blockchain for about a year, I decided to explore the rest of the graphene family too. So I will test a witness node for BitShares as well, then I will try to see how DECENT is going on (hoping to get more info about that form @roelandp, at SteemFest).
***
_I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at [Dragos Roua](http://dragosroua.com) where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua._
<center>
![Dragos Roua](http://dragosroua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/bamf-e1448824881306.png)</center>
***
<center>_You can also vote for me as witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses_</center>
***
_If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform)_:
* [Rewards: Were Does The Money Come From?](https://steemit.com/steemit/@dragosroua/steemit-newbie-faq-rewards-were-does-the-money-come-from)
* [Netiquette: How To Avoid Being A Steem Douche?](https://steemit.com/steem/@dragosroua/steemit-newbie-faq-netiquette-how-to-avoid-being-a-steem-douche)
* [Witnesses: What Are They And Why Should You Care?](https://steemit.com/steemit/@dragosroua/steemit-newbie-faq-witnesses-what-are-they-and-why-should-you-care)
* [How Can I Mine Steem And What CPU / GPU Power Do I Need For That?](https://steemit.com/steemit/@dragosroua/steemit-newbie-faq-how-can-i-mine-steem-and-what-cpu-gpu-power-do-i-need-for-that)