I am glad you are bringing this up. @xeroc 's worker needs votes ASAP. Most witnesses that run gateways provide public nodes. But that's not enough! My Public API node now runs at 66GB RAM and doubled the average open connections from last month. This is becoming the true cost of the infrastructure vs. running the witness node which can be now tweaked to run under 2GB RAM. I know @startail also provides the API node but is not voted in. There was some talk among the devs about reducing the RAM requirement for the full nodes and that would help lower the cost of the full nodes because right now we are looking at 96GB minimum, 128GB recommended and 256GB to be safe and we need several of them to handle the traffic.
Thanks for the mention, I do indeed run an access node on wss://bitshares.crypto.fans, located in Munich Germany, and has been in the clients access node list since its start. Since I'm still not an active witness, but found the lack of accessible nodes for the clients to few, it's just a connection node running with a little less memory and capabilities than a full API node.
I put it online at the time there wheren't that many access nodes available on the network, and it's been running stable since then.
It's running on an optimized server with ~20GB memory usage at the moment, and is heavly used by the community.
I'm looking at expanding towards a public API and faster access node, but so far I've haven't had the money to put out a bigger server(s) for this as I'm not gaining anything back for it.
However, I intend to start up a full featured node on a dedicated instance with full memory usage for the community in the soon future.