On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 02:23:38PM +0200, s7r wrote:
as well as disadvantages:
- you will have higher latency;
- the bandwidth of your relay will be of the speed of the VPN itself,
and shared VPN usually are slow for high grade server connections that run 24x7 with constant bandwidth usage;
Another disadvantage to consider: if you run your relay via a VPN, then you are expanding the surface area of who around the internet gets to see the Tor traffic flowing through your relay. It's encrypted, yes, but encryption doesn't hide traffic characteristics like timing and volume.
So it's not just a performance issue, it's also a security issue. The farther away from your relay the VPN is, the more the traffic is traversing parts of the network it doesn't really need to, and the more appealing it becomes to instead "just run a relay where the VPN is".
--Roger