[tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays

[delber]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 05:14:44PM -0400, Andrew Lewis wrote:
> $100 is not going to cut it most likely, even for only 100 mbit
> traffic only. Most providers are really antsy about spam/DMCA reports,
> and aren't willing to deal with it for that cheap. I'd suspect that
> you are looking at the $150-$200+ range, at least in my experience.

We are a small group of people trying to setup something like
torservers.net in France. We already made quite a bunch of contacts with
a small amount of french ISP to ask them about hosting Tor exit relays.
The list is long and we are not over yet. But here is what we know as
today.

We already have ruled out the three major cheap hosting providers: OVH,
Gandi and Dedibox. All of them are listed as bad ISPs on GoodBadISPs as
prohibiting relays in their ToS. What is fun is that exit nodes running
on their french IPs still account for 2.3353% of total P_exit (out of
2.6573% for all french exit nodes).

We have approached some other big commercial ISPs. It was not a formal
inquiry, but they did not look very happy at the idea of hosting exit
nodes.

What we have found though, is that several smaller (not-for-profits or
coops) ISPs would be happy to help the Tor network, provided there is a
clear legal boundary. Something that our not-for-profit would create.
The downside is that they are small, so the cost of their bandwidth is
between a monthly 3€ and 10€ (when it is not even more) for each Mbps
(95%ile). But they would stand in case of trouble. And some of them have
an economic interest as using more bandwidth would lower their overall
cost per Mbps.

One of them is willing to sponsor some of the bandwidth, and it looks
like a good place to start an initial set of nodes. But even with their
sponsoring, $100/month will not cover hosting+bandwidth expenses.


It might be something desirable though. If external funding does not
cover all the costs, then we will have to campaign for other donations.
A good habit, as it makes it more likely that at least some of the nodes
would survive in case the external funding stops.

-- 
delber
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