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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

I have doubts about running a relay on a VPS, or on any other machine that I don't physically control for that matter.

Tor security relies on multiple nodes being hard to seize synchronously. This property goes away if the majority of people run their nodes as virtual machines on infrastructure provided by a few cloud providers.

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I feel the same way. The main benefit of a VPS is that they're typically cheap, resource sufficient, and hosted somewhere that isn't your residence. There is an additional benefit, you can spin up a VPS within an hour then deploy a docker image to resume your node. However, a hosting provider may ban tor activity then subsequently disable services for accounts running tor nodes (this is alleviated by the aforementioned quick deployment).

The tor project recommends against using OVH and Hetzner because they have such a large AS presence in the tor network [1]. The tor project also maintains a list of ISPs and they're "friendliness" [2] - some of which are totally anonymous. Every relay operator should familiarise themselves with the ISP page when deploying a relay. Another diversity problem extends to the OSs themselves, Debian has an overwhelming presence [3].

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorRelayGuide#... [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISP... [3] https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/#os-distribution-relays

There are thousands of VPS hosters, not a few.

And the big 3 are more expensive wrt traffic, so I could imagine most nodes are run on smaller providers with cheaper bandwidth.

How many of those VPS hosters rely on infrastructure from OVH, Hetzner, ColoCrossing, Azure, AWS, or GCP?

> OVH, Hetzner, ColoCrossing

Maybe a third or so?

> Azure, AWS, or GCP?

0.1% at best

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