On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 05:14:44PM -0400, Andrew Lewis wrote:
$100 is not going to cut it most likely, even for only 100 mbit traffic only. Most providers are really antsy about spam/DMCA reports, and aren't willing to deal with it for that cheap. I'd suspect that you are looking at the $150-$200+ range, at least in my experience.
We are a small group of people trying to setup something like torservers.net in France. We already made quite a bunch of contacts with a small amount of french ISP to ask them about hosting Tor exit relays. The list is long and we are not over yet. But here is what we know as today.
We already have ruled out the three major cheap hosting providers: OVH, Gandi and Dedibox. All of them are listed as bad ISPs on GoodBadISPs as prohibiting relays in their ToS. What is fun is that exit nodes running on their french IPs still account for 2.3353% of total P_exit (out of 2.6573% for all french exit nodes).
We have approached some other big commercial ISPs. It was not a formal inquiry, but they did not look very happy at the idea of hosting exit nodes.
What we have found though, is that several smaller (not-for-profits or coops) ISPs would be happy to help the Tor network, provided there is a clear legal boundary. Something that our not-for-profit would create. The downside is that they are small, so the cost of their bandwidth is between a monthly 3€ and 10€ (when it is not even more) for each Mbps (95%ile). But they would stand in case of trouble. And some of them have an economic interest as using more bandwidth would lower their overall cost per Mbps.
One of them is willing to sponsor some of the bandwidth, and it looks like a good place to start an initial set of nodes. But even with their sponsoring, $100/month will not cover hosting+bandwidth expenses.
It might be something desirable though. If external funding does not cover all the costs, then we will have to campaign for other donations. A good habit, as it makes it more likely that at least some of the nodes would survive in case the external funding stops.