[tor-relays] Running dedicated Tor node hosting

[abuse at lokodlare.com]

Hello,

in my opinion, I am not sure if this is a good business idea.

If I wanted to support the tor network "as a service", I'd donate to some of the very large relay operators that accept donations and are non-profits. That way, probably 80+% of what I donate goes directly into running tor nodes. Nobody is wanting to make any kind of profit and (in some cases) it might even be tax-deductible for me. Not sure how a business can compete with any of that.

Also, understand how big your potential market is. There are around 6-8k tor relays/bridges out there. In an absolute best case scenario, you could max out at around 5 to 10% of that. I highly doubt this will be enough to sustain a larger business. 

Furthermore, running a lot of Tor nodes, especially including exits, has an effect on your infrastructure. You will require tons of bandwidth and quite a bit of extra admin effort to deal with abuse complains not only from the wide internet, but also from your business partners. I had ISPs that had to part ways with me because some of their upstream providers put them under pressure. That all costs a considerable amount of money.

Having said all of that, I doubt anyone has any objections for you guys to start a business providing Tor nodes. Just make sure it is clear you are not associated with Tor or the Tor Project in any way. Just like a game server hoster for Minecraft is free to offer such services but has no association with the developers of Minecraft or it's publisher Microsoft.

Best Regards,
Kristian 

Dec 20, 2021, 01:44 by tor at online-hangout.com:

> Hello me and my friend have been working on a startup now for a while and I was wondering if we would be able to run like professionally hosted Tor nodes as like a service. It's so people who want to run like say any type of Tor node including exits and bridges can pay me and my friend to have them hosted and not have to deal with the complicated stuff that comes with hosting that kind of stuff. I just wanted to see if that's fine
>

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