[tor-relays] German company Webtropia: Terminated contract without notice because of abuse

[uf at riseup.net]

Hi all,

I've been running two exit relays, [1] and [2], at the German company
Webtropia [3] for the past two weeks. Things went quite nice and smoothly,
the speed of the server was decent and the network great, pushing quite
some terabyte.

Before renting the server, I told them what I wanted to do, if the would
forward abuse etc. They said there were fine with this and forwarding
would be no problem, given that I would deal with such mails in a timely
manner. So I decided to rent the server, maybe naive?

Yesterday (29th) they stopped routing/switching traffic to the server, so
it wasn't accessible anymore. They sent me a mail, the subject read
"termination without notice", claiming they did this because I didn't pay
the invoice. I replied that I doubt this and sent them the transaction
details. Their reply claimed that my contract wasn't quited because of
this, but instead of abuse: They wrote that they got "52 mails" the day
before (28th) dealing with phishing mails, bittorent downloads, ddos, etc.
I told them once again that this server is housing tor exit nodes, and I'm
not responsible for the traffic. However, I asked if we could find an
agreement and "meet in the middle": Closing some ports (25 for example)
and forward the mails to me, so I would take care of these and they could
lie back and think "not our department" (actually as spoken about
beforehand). Sadly there wasn't any negotiation possible, the denied me
(up until now at least) even a refund of the money I already paid (is this
legal?).

Just to inform you about this.
Stay away of them - they don't keep their words.

Cheers,
uf


[1]
https://globe.torproject.org/#/relay/94CB5C820BF97391BFDCAF8DD1B3176A452E8FB2

[2]
https://globe.torproject.org/#/relay/55A463CAB24AFB91073C6D6D7CC6CA741A1430E2

[3] https://www.webtropia.com/en/