On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:47:40 -0800 Micah Lee micahflee@riseup.net allegedly wrote:
FYI, I just discovered a VPS provider DigitalOcean, and they seem fine with people running non-exit nodes:
Yep - that "mick" was me. I contacted them through their forum foillowing a recommendation from Roman Mamedov on this list (see my post of 4 January).
The cheapest plan is $5/month (256mb ram, 1 core, 20gb drive) with unlimited bandwidth. They give you New York and Amsterdam IP addresses. I haven't tried running a relay on it so I don't know how much bandwidth you can practically use, but it looks promising.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I signed up for their cheapest plan (on 31/12/12) to test it. The VM has debian installed. I initially fired up tor with no restrictions whatever to see what happened. I quickly ran out CPU cycles. Tor log complained "Your computer is too slow to handle this many circuit creation requests! Please consider using the MaxAdvertisedBandwidth config option or choosing a more restricted exit policy." At one point (after a couple of days) tor just stopped and did not restart. No setting for MaxAdvertisedBandwidth I tried seemed to make any difference so I started experimenting with various throttle limits on the relay. I also set NumCPU to 1 and MaxOnionsPending 250 after reading a post recommending that.
I currently have BandwidthRate 2500 KB and BandwidthBurst 2800 KB set and have a stable node that is running at circa 34 Mbit/s with just over 1000 tor circuits. Top reports cpu usage at around 30% and my vnstat stats (see below) predict 8.62 TiB traffic for the month.
Now that I have a baseline, I will start to slowly ramp up the bandwidth allowance again to see what happens.
Frankly, compared to my previous experience with some UK providers (see my posts about thrustvps in particular) this level of traffic for this price is astounding. If it keeps up, I'll likely pay for extra servers.
Mick
---- vnstat snapshot this morning -----
Database updated: Wed Jan 9 09:02:29 2013
eth0 since 12/31/12
rx: 1.15 TiB tx: 1.18 TiB total: 2.33 TiB
monthly rx | tx | total | avg. rate ------------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- Dec '12 75.50 MiB | 2.35 MiB | 77.85 MiB | 0.24 kbit/s Jan '13 1.15 TiB | 1.18 TiB | 2.33 TiB | 27.63 Mbit/s ----------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- estimated 4.25 TiB | 4.36 TiB | 8.62 TiB |
daily rx | tx | total | avg. rate ---------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- yesterday 213.13 GiB | 217.74 GiB | 430.87 GiB | 41.83 Mbit/s today 64.71 GiB | 66.44 GiB | 131.16 GiB | 33.80 Mbit/s --------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- estimated 171.93 GiB | 176.52 GiB | 348.46 GiB |
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blog: baldric.net gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312
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