Hi everyone, our organization is working to add more physical nodes, in our little Italy headquarter[1]. We have reached an agreement with one of the available fiber reseller there, where we will pay for L2 transport to a datacenter, where we will buy our uplink separately and announce and route our public IP addresses independently.
It is actually a very nice opportunity to remove a point of trust in the chain and get back control to a part of infrastructure that is usually delegated to commercial ISP. Similarly, as this list knows well, by announcing our IPs we will be the direct recipients of any abuse.
We have now two options: either look for someone willing to lease a /24 to Tor operators, which is not an easy task since the block reputation will be tainted and depreciate the block. We have found someone willing to, for $119/mo, but it is hard to tell how long that will last.
An alternative would be to buy it, for around ~7k$ (~28-31$ per IP, via a broker). We do not have the budget for this now, but an organization member has offered to lease the money and get paid back without interest at a similar rate that a lease would cost (around $1k year). In all phases, the block will be in the org ownership. We have someone who can LIR sponsor at RIPE so we would not have other recurring expenses.
Buying is more sustainable in the long-term: in around 6 years we will stop to have to pay the lease. At the same time, we will not have any chances to change those IP ever later, while in a lease, we could eventually move to other blocks.
Does anybody in the community have contacts for lease or sale? Is there any foreseeable issue in sticking to the same range for the next ~10 years?
Especially at the beginning, it will be unlikely that we will use even 1/4 of them, but given how the fiber infrastructure is built, we can eventually use the same announcements even for other physical locations.
Thank you
[1] - https://osservatorionessuno.org/blog/2024/07/we-have-a-headquarter-and-it-is...