Thanks for the clarification. The Tor community page makes two separate points about Hetzner (https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/good-bad-isps/ ): “These hosts already have many Tor nodes being hosted there.” and later notes that: “It is not a problem, however, abuse reports can lead to a server lock.” The second point is what I was referring to. Temporary relay unreachability due to outages is expected behavior, and Tor guidance discourages relay-to-relay blocking. Best, Tor at 1AEO On Saturday, January 3rd, 2026 at 11:23 PM, Ralph Seichter via tor-relays <tor-relays@lists.torproject.org> wrote:
* Tor at 1AEO via tor-relays:
A few clarifications, grounded in Tor Project guidance: [...]
- Tor’s community resources note that relay operators should “try to avoid the following hosters,” listing Hetzner, based on documented operational friction reported by relay operators https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/good-bad-isps/
That's misleading at best. The reason Hetzner is named as one of a few ISPs to possibly avoid, and which you chose not to quote, is this:
For network diversity and stronger anonymity, you should avoid providers and countries that already attract a lot of Tor capacity. [...] These hosts already have many Tor nodes being hosted there.
I have hosted Tor relays on Hetzner for many years, am still doing so now, and I did not experience "operational friction". On the contrary. Hetzner are in fact Tor-friendly. Even their legal department told me that running Tor nodes is fine as long as they don't negatively impact Hetzner's infrastructure.
The main problem is that >100 IPv4 addresses in your single /24 network
have been unreachable several times during 2025. Hetzner's automated tools interpret connection attempts to so many hosts in a /24 in a short timeframe (originating from a given Hetzner based Tor node) as a possible network scan, which is fair enough. That's just erring on the side of caution, and they are notifying their own customers of a non-standard traffic pattern.
I am positive that if you split your nodes across a more varied IPv4 address space, false alerts could be mitigated. I do appreciate what you do for the Tor network, but please don't attempt to throw shade on Hetzner. They are simply trying to run a responsible hosting business.
-Ralph _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list -- tor-relays@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to tor-relays-leave@lists.torproject.org