[tor-relays] Tip: Cheap fast dedicated servers for exit relays

fatal fatal at mailbox.org
Fri May 20 18:25:47 UTC 2016


Ahoy!

they are not in chiapas, they don't have a classy AS and (mostly) no
esoteric operating systems. But they are cheap, fast and can be run as
exit relays: the budget servers from Oneprovider
(http://oneprovider.com/dedicated-servers/budget-servers).

Oneprovider resells dedicated servers around the world and they handle
all the 'sale' servers from online.net. Following the good/bad isp wiki
page Online.net themself don't allow tor relays for quite some time. But
oneprovider is "vpn friendly" (email from sales person) and I'm running
a couple of exit relays with them for a couple of months.

The abuse handling varies and depends on the provider they are reselling
from. With the online.net servers I get one abuse mail every (!) monday
for every server which states something about stopforumspam. I log in to
the managment panel and reply that I'm running a tor server and can do
nothing about this because stopforumspam doesn't provide more
information and they close the ticket. That's it, never got any other
abuse mails (running a reduced exit policy).

The VIA Nano U2250 powered dedicated servers (Paris) cost 7€ a month (no
setup fee, no ipmi, unlimited transfer) throughput max. is 82 Mbit/s in
and out (throughput limit is the cpu, 1 core, no aes-ni, with iptables
as in the arch wiki) with linux and max. 74 Mbit/s  with freebsd (no pf,
libressl, with openssl it's sightly faster¹).

The Intel Atom C2350 powered dedicated servers (Paris and Amsterdam)
cost 15€ a month (ipmi but no custom iso mount, only linux and windows
are offered², unlimited transfer) and pushes ~180 Mbit/s in each
direction with one tor instance (linux, stateles iptables and kernel
tweaks for 100mbit+ relays from arch wiki and torservers.net, grsecurity
kernel). The CPU (2 cores, aes-ni) isn't fully utilised so there is room
for another tor instance (I'll move one of my relays there for testing
when one of my VIA Nano contracts expire).

Running more of these dedicated servers won't help making the tor
network 'better' as in diversity (et al.) bus as in citius, altius,
fortius.

So if you would like to have a new, cheap, fast and easy to care
mainstream (exit-)relay: go for it \o/

¹ I'm no BSD expert and am wondering why stateless pf uses so 'much'
more cpu power than statess iptables. Maybe someone can enlighten me :)
² Which I really feel sad about, I was hopeing for beeing the one with
the fastest openbsd exit relay in the world - and that for 15 € a month ;)


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