[tor-relays] Supporting TOR: Seeking Affordable and Reliable Server Providers in Eastern Europe

[coal_norm_0v at icloud.com]

Hello everyone,

I’ve been a fan of Tor for many years now, and my affinity for anonymity naturally extends to other interests, such as Monero… 😉

I’ve successfully rallied like-minded individuals who have generously supported our cause through various grants, and we’ve even received a government subsidy from the Czech Republic to promote freedom of speech in oppressive regimes.

With a substantial sum of money at our disposal, we’ve chosen to allocate a portion to support the TOR project. Currently, we operate around 60 servers. Our main challenge, unsurprisingly, is with exit servers. Convincing providers to overlook automatic complaint notifications has proven quite tricky. From our original 30 exit nodes, we’re down to about 5—the rest had to be shifted to relay nodes. We could switch them to well-known operators like RDP.sh, but they already host a large number of exit nodes, and we prefer to encourage network diversity.

We’ve initiated something akin to a cost-sharing model for enabling our servers to run exit nodes, but it hasn’t made a significant impact.

We want to spend our funds wisely to support Tor. Do any of you have suggestions for good, affordable providers in less conventional locations (e.g., Eastern Europe like Poland, Hungary, Ukraine)?

Thanks for any ideas,

Alex
https://tor.foundation