Re: [tor-relays] [tor-assistants] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 03:05:32PM +0100, Andrew Beveridge wrote:
> > - What do you currently pay for hosting/bandwidth, and how much bandwidth
> > do you get for that?
> 
> This is a complicated question, because I run a single Tor exit in a VPS on
> my company dedicated server. I run a local company doing computer repair
> and web development, and lease a single dedicated server from OVH (more
> specifically, Kimsufi) for a total of £64 a month (inc. VAT). That gets me
> the Kimsufi 16G dedicated server, a RIPE block of 4 extra IPs, and an
> external 2TB HDD. 100Mbit pipe, 10TB/month bandwidth. £0.87/TB if I go over
> that, so if I were to max out the bandwidth for an entire month, using
> around 30TB traffic, I would have to pay about £18 on top for the extra
> bandwidth. However, according to the OVH manager I never seem to go
> anywhere near the traffic limit, despite having had the exit set to use
> 50Mbit/s constantly for the past 3 months.

Sounds like you should bump it up to 100mbit then. ;)

You can see on
http://atlas.torproject.org/#details/FA02311AF49EB663CA2685A8604C403A9E10E6E3
that there are periods where your rate limiting is bottlenecking traffic.

> As far as I'm concerned, it costs me nothing to run this exit node - my
> company needs the dedicated server regardless, and none of the ~50 websites
> I host use enough traffic to be affected by the fact that my server is
> using half it's available bandwidth for Tor.
> In an ideal world, I would rent a second Kimsufi server just for Tor
> purposes, which would cost £36/month (Kimsufi 16G) + £4/month (RIPE block).
> 
> Therefore, if I were to participate in this experiment, I would say *£40
> GBP / month* would get *10TB of 100 Mbit/s* exit traffic.
> Additional *20TB* traffic could be purchased for *£18 / month*, which would
> bring the maximum cost to *$92 USD / month.*

Sounds like a good price. And even though everybody says OVH is
unsuitable, it looks worth continuing to try in this case.

Maybe we can encourage you to run the new one as you describe, but also
bump up the bandwidth on the first one. As you say, it's unlikely that
you'll actually max out the transit all the time.

> As I have only been running this exit for 3 months, I am far from an
> authoritative voice on the issue of abuse complaints, but the most
> important thing is definitely SWIP as far as I can see it - the IP address
> I use for the exit is one from the RIPE block I lease and as such the abuse
> email is my own.

Yes, a SWIP seems increasingly critical for stable exits.

> Definitely! As far as I'm concerned, I am not worried about legal issues as
> long as I can purchase hosting through my business and SWIP the IP, and I
> have plenty of free time to spend configuring servers and responding to
> abuse emails, so if I had the money I would happily be running exit nodes
> in any country I could find a hosting provider in - money is the hurdle for
> me.

I say we set this one up and see how it goes. In your spare time, please
do continue to look for other opportunities. You should probably compare
notes with Moritz, Julian, et al here about places you find.

> One thing which I haven't seen discussed yet is how funding would actually
> be connected with operators - I'm not sure if you were thinking about the
> funder(s) directly sending money to operators, or if The Tor Project Inc
> would be acting as a middleman? What money transfer mechanisms would be
> safe to use, how would you verify that the money was going to the right
> person, would The Tor Project Inc receive invoices directly from hosting
> companies or would operators email copies of invoices to someone and then
> some money would turn up in their bank accounts? What about PayPal, etc?
> Just a few thoughts :)

I definitely don't want Tor to be in the middle of the transactions --
if Tor pays the bills directly, that's too much like being the relay
operator. One nice situation would be for you to produce receipts showing
expenses, and then we reimburse those costs. It requires fronting a bit
of money on your part, but that's part of saving the world, yes? :)

Ultimately, we're also going to want to look into reducing overhead on
Tor's side from sending out money. If we have to write and mail 50 checks
every month, that's going to waste a lot of somebody's time. Maybe that
means Paypal is the way to go. Maybe it means we send some money in bulk
to Zwiebelfreunde, and they do intra-Europe wire transfers to the other
Europeans (though I admit maybe that just shifts the time-wasting). Lots
of options there. What would be best for you?

All of this said, don't go out and start spending money quite yet.
We should figure out these logistics first. And Tor should get a bit
more of a handle on what this diversity thing should mean. And I should
get buy-in from other Tor people for my plans here. :)

--Roger

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