On 25.04.18 13:33, mick wrote:

I had an email from them saying that as one or the group "grandfathered in" back in 2013 I could carry on regardless.

Good on yer... DigitalOcean bills for outbound traffic, and with a price of $0.01/GB (sadly not GiB) every TB in excess of a Droplet's monthly allowance--a meager 1GB for their smallest model--will cost an extra 10 USD. Who has that kind of money?

-Ralph

On 25.04.18 14:50, mick wrote:

I think I'm immensely lucky to get the service I do.

Indeed. I guess DigitalOcean's loss will be Hetzner's gain as far as my business is concerned. See https://www.hetzner.com/cloud . I already use CX11 and CX21 models and they are seriously good, as is Hetzner's service. Also, 20 GB monthly traffic allowance are Nice™.

-Ralph

On 25.04.18 15:38, Nagaev Boris wrote:

...

Also, 20 GB monthly traffic allowance are Nice™.

• 20 TB

Argh! Of course I once again meant TB. :-)

A word of caution for Tor exits, though: Hetzner allows exit nodes, but they are very strict when it comes to potential abuse. If one does not react quickly enough, network access is automatically suspended.

For example, reaction time gets shorter with each repeated report of network scans originating from Hetzner IP addresses, down to only a few hours. If you happen to be asleep at the time: tough. ;-)

-Ralph

On 25.04.18 16:48, Tobias Sachs wrote:

The interesting thing about Hetzer is that only outgoing traffic is counted towards the billing.

D.O. does the same. Still, $0.01 per extra GB is theft in my book.

https://twitter.com/Knightyyyy1/status/988868691868749825

Unfortunately I beat your stats by quite a margin. :-P

-Ralph

Tobias Sachs:

The interesting thing about Hetzer is that only outgoing traffic is counted towards the billing.

"AccountingRule out" is handy in cases where only outgoing traffic is metered.

https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en#AccountingRule

My droplet allows for 1TB ..... I suppose I'll have to find a part time job or make changes in the relay.

eth0 / monthly

month rx | tx | total | avg. rate ------------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- May '17 2.69 TiB | 2.74 TiB | 5.43 TiB | 17.40 Mbit/s Jun '17 2.75 TiB | 2.79 TiB | 5.55 TiB | 18.39 Mbit/s Jul '17 4.17 TiB | 4.22 TiB | 8.40 TiB | 26.93 Mbit/s Aug '17 4.75 TiB | 4.84 TiB | 9.59 TiB | 30.76 Mbit/s Sep '17 5.26 TiB | 5.36 TiB | 10.63 TiB | 35.22 Mbit/s Oct '17 8.72 TiB | 8.85 TiB | 17.58 TiB | 56.37 Mbit/s Nov '17 12.44 TiB | 12.56 TiB | 25.00 TiB | 82.86 Mbit/s Dec '17 11.27 TiB | 11.36 TiB | 22.62 TiB | 72.55 Mbit/s Jan '18 12.17 TiB | 12.42 TiB | 24.59 TiB | 78.86 Mbit/s Feb '18 11.23 TiB | 11.38 TiB | 22.61 TiB | 80.27 Mbit/s Mar '18 9.00 TiB | 9.10 TiB | 18.10 TiB | 58.05 Mbit/s Apr '18 7.27 TiB | 7.31 TiB | 14.57 TiB | 59.07 Mbit/s ------------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- estimated 8.89 TiB | 8.94 TiB | 17.83 TiB |

Since I'm retired I will make changes in the relay.

On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 7:33 PM, Ralph Seichter m16+tor@monksofcool.net wrote:

On 25.04.18 13:33, mick wrote:

...

I had an email from them saying that as one or the group "grandfathered in" back in 2013 I could carry on regardless.

Good on yer... DigitalOcean bills for outbound traffic, and with a price of $0.01/GB (sadly not GiB) every TB in excess of a Droplet's monthly allowance--a meager 1GB for their smallest model--will cost an extra 10 USD. Who has that kind of money?

-Ralph _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

On Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:15:35 +0000 Cody Logan clpo13@gmail.com allegedly wrote:

Regarding grandfathered accounts, section 3.7 of their terms of service is worth a closer look:

“Subscribers of Grandfathered Accounts must NOT: (i) run Torrents for download or Seed Servers, TOR, or services that include content of an adult or pornographic nature [...] or otherwise circumvent the intended fair usage of free bandwidth by distributing it freely to others. Failure of Subscribers of Grandfathered Accounts to follow these terms will result in the revocation of their Accounts' grandfathered status.”

https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/

All

Following this I went back to Rafael Rosa, the Product Manager at DigitalOcean who originally sent the email about the changes seeking clarification. I also pointed him to the discussion here on this list because I was unlikely to be the only one affected by the change.

Following several emails Rafael kindly confirmed that so long as my droplet was not the source of any "abuse" reported to DO by third parties I could continue as is. By "abuse" RR meant hostile activity such as port scanning. I pointed out that since my droplet was a non-exit relay, then it would be unlikely to be the source of such activity. RR did say however, that non "grandfathered" accounts would in future automatically be billed for any over limit bandwidth usage. I should also note here that exit relays are, by their nature, likely to see activity which DO might categorise as abuse so any exit relay operators using DO should take care.

Our correspondence is shown below. Rafael has kindly agreed that I may share this with the list and I am grateful to him for that agreement. I am also exceptionally grateful for the continued ability to provide my Tor node to the community at its current usage level without incurring the sort of financial penalty I could have expected.

My thanks to all at DO and to Rafael in particular for this.

Mick

-------------------------- correspondence --------------------------

RR original email

Hello,

I’m Rafael Rosa, Product Manager at DigitalOcean. I want to share a heartfelt thank you for being such a valued, long-time customer. As you may know, we’ve made some updates to our bandwidth pricing plans https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/. With gratitude for your loyalty, we want to assure you that your account has been grandfathered into your current pricing plan and you will not incur any charges for bandwidth usage as long as you comply with the guidelines outlined in section 3.7 of our Terms of Service https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/.

If you are interested in viewing your bandwidth usage, you can now track usage in the billing page https://cloud.digitalocean.com/settings/billing where Droplet data transfer is updated daily. And if you’re curious to learn more about the details of the bandwidth update, I encourage you to take a look at this FAQ page https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/digitalocean-bandwidth-billing-faq.

Happy Coding,

Rafael Rosa Product Manager, DigitalOcean

Me

Many thanks for this. However, I note that section 3.7 says, inter alia:

"Notwithstanding the foregoing, Subscribers of Grandfathered Accounts must NOT: (i) run Torrents for download or Seed Servers, TOR, or services that include content of an adult or pornographic nature; (ii) resell services through their Account to provide free bandwidth to other individuals;"

My droplet "roof.rlogin.net" is , and always has been, a Tor (not "TOR") relay node.

Do I take it from section 3.7 that you will no longer permit that? If so, I will need to move to another provider.

RR

Sorry about the delay in replying. So, the current policy does have a restriction on tor nodes, but we are not enforcing it automatically. As long as we don't detect abuse it should be fine.

I hope this helps.

Me

Many thanks for this, but with respect the answer is a little ambiguous. Your policy statement at 3.7 of your ToS implies that any bandwidth usage above that permitted wil be chargeable /regardless/ of grandfather status if that bandwidth is "given away" to third parties (such as through Tor). Yet you say here that you are "not enforcing that automatically". How will I know if/when you do decide to enforce that? And what do you define as "abuse"?

I am sure that you will understand that I need clarification because I could potentially be hit with a severe financial penalty should you choose to enforce the policy without my noticing. I appreciate that as a $10.00 a month customer I am getting a phenomenally good deal and fully accept that I may have to pay more in future (regardless of your original offer back in 2013 of "free bandwidth forever" when I was grandfathered in). If I have to throttle my Tor node to a particular level of usage then I need to know what that "acceptable usage" level would be.

I am not alone in this position. There is some discussion on the Tor Relays mailing list (see the thread at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2018-April/015051.html) so some clarity would be very useful. I would like to be able to go back the list with that clarity, but before doing so, I need to be sure of my facts.

RR

Thanks for the pointer to the email thread. We usually look into abuse when someone from the general public reports issues or we detect a problem from our monitoring, like port scanning.

When that happens the user is notified and support have procedures to handle the situation, but the exact details vary based on the complaint.

I can't predict if you will ever be reported, so the safest approach is to keep you usage under the droplet limits, or at least keep an eye on the usage.

Please understand we are trying to give a good deal for the customers that have been with us for a long time. I don't know if that applies for everybody on the email list.

Me

Thanks for coming back so quickly.

Firstly, since my Tor node is not an exit, you are unlikely to see any reportable hostile activity such as port scanning. Exits often see a lot of that, and many providers don't like the flak they inevitably (and understandably) get for that. So I guess I'm unlikely to be reported.

BUT, if you are saying I need to keep my bandwidth usage under the droplet limit, that implies one of two limits: 1TB (if I assume that the max allowed for one droplet) ot 2TB (if I assume that I may aggregate the usage of the two droplets I currently have, one of which is hardly used at all). Either way, that is a huge drop from my current average 20 TB of transfer.

So: are you saying now that I must stick to the droplet limits regardless of the original offer of free bandwidth forever? I'm sorry to have to press this point, but I need to know. As do others who may be in my position.

RR

If you are not reported, you can keep using as is. For non-grandfathered users, they will be automatically billed when they exceed the transfer limit, which is pooled across all droplets, which in your example it would be 2TB.

------------------------- end correspondence -----------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------- Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 http://baldric.net/about-trivia ---------------------------------------------------------------------

They are slowly becoming an AWS Clone - they keep adding more and more services making the UI Confusing. Now they've even copied AWSs bill per GB. What's next?

Ralph Seichter:

On 02.05.18 18:17, mick wrote:

...

Following this I went back to Rafael Rosa, the Product Manager at DigitalOcean who originally sent the email about the changes seeking clarification.

I also had a back-and-forth with DigitalOcean support staff. Sadly, no revelations ensued, so I'll be closing my DO account at the end of this month.

/me shrugs

-Ralph

---

tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

On Wed, 25 Apr 2018 18:53:56 +0300 pikami tor@pikami.org wrote:

Does anyone know where I should move my relay? I can't afford to spend a lot of money, I can only do 5$ a month.

There's not a lot of hosts with cheap unmetered bandwidth -- OVH and Online.net come to mind -- and the majority of them is already heavily used for Tor (so it's not advised to add more).

Consider switching your relay to a bridge instead, those consume little bandwidth and can even be run at home (if your connection is stable enough).

Hi,

pikami:

Does anyone know where I should move my relay? I can't afford to spend a lot of money, I can only do 5$ a month.

Have a look at https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers they usually have good offers in various locations.

Cheers, ~Vasilis