[tor-talk] New site attempting to help Tor grow

Sun Apr 19 10:35:37 UTC 2015

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Some more ideas for you, in case you continue your project:

Lets say you find a suitable hosting provider that fulfills your
automation requirements and offers reasonable unmetered instances but
might be to costly for a single sponsor.
Instead of "offering" relays (only) - that, depending on the actual
price, might represent a high entry barrier - you could "offer" tor
network capacity. That is actually what matters.
Every sponsor can support X mbps of the next upcoming relay for a
year, once the next relay is financed you can fire it up. If the
sponsor wants his own tor instance name he has to provide for at least
1/2 of the relay cost (if you run lets say two tor instances per server)
.

Such an approach could lower the entry barrier for potential sponsors.
(You will probably want to limit the minimal amount to some reasonable
value.)

Regarding requirements for automation (hosting provider), I guess
these are the minimal
requirements:

- - automatic order submission (I assume payment is taken care of
automatically by charging the account's credit card)
- - get the IP address of the new server
- - pre authorized SSH public key on every new server

Ansible could take care of the rest.

> even if using something like salt or ansible you still need to run
> a command

It doesn't have to be a human.