Wow for some reasons I’ve missed your post. Somehow it seems that @partiko didn’t show it in the list of posts mentioning me.

I have not any power down but to keep cost down I had to shutdown my seed node and I’m planning to spin one back up when price goes back up a bit and I can justify the expenses because I’m paying off my own money at the moment.

To note that I’m running multiple nodes in addition to the witness node:

• 1x Hivemind node that powers http://steemrest.steemulant.com/api-docs/ that powers @steemtelly, my still under development @dtube and @dsound app for AppleTV
• 1x IPFS pinning server for the bot that pins @dtube videos and that is free for use on @onelovedtube Discord server
• 1x VPS that runs my various bots such as the @steemusa automated footer generator https://steemit.com/witness-category/@quochuy/automated-footer-banner-bot-for-steemusa-community
• 1x webserver to host various little tools such as the API that is used by Steemed Phish Chrome Extension and host the admin tools for @smartvote

All these costs $$ so I’m definitely not running a Witness for the money.

Now to answer your questions.

Should witnesses stop powering down and accumulate until the price goes up? Probably is but then everyone has their own personal issues and might be in a different situation in life. I have a day job and I’m not on Steem to try make a living or anything so I can afford to spend part of my hard earned money to rent servers for the witness and other community projects. It’s not the case for everyone so I can’t judge their decision to power down. I play the long term game and it’s my choice and I have the ability to make that choice.

For the cost of running a witness node, it varies a lot depending on the specs but I’m running a server at $25 a month. It is low spec and is slow to replay (over 24h) but once it reaches the head block it works just fine and for a backup witness at my rank it is doing its job and I will upgrade it as soon as needed.