I have been running a tor middle relay[1] for the past few months.
One thing that I noticed in the last two months is that my relay is eating up the 1tb bandwidth in the first three weeks. So I am thinking of moving to a better plan or tweaking the current config to serve the bandwidth so that the relay is up for the entire month.
I assume that you want a recommendation. A better plan probably means spending more money. Would be better for the network. If you can spare the money, go for it.
If you dont want to spend more money than it would be a good idea to lower the Rate value until you end up within your traffic limit for the month. The benefit would be a permanent available relay.
Hmm, I think I will try changing the rate and see what happens. Last year, I used a daily limit instead of monthly one. It drastically reduced the relays reported bandwidth ( 1Mbps to 60 kbps ).
If you are on the 1TB plan at DigitalOcean, you will want to set something like the following:
RelayBandwidthRate 600 KB # Throttle traffic to 600KB/s RelayBandwidthBurst 1.2 MB # But allow bursts up to 1.2 MB/s
rather than set a daily or monthly limit. The reason being that your server will stay up all the time instead of suddenly hibernating (essentially going offline) when it hits the cap.