[tor-relays] Considering running a relay on AWS Free tier

Mailing Lists tor-relays
1

Hi,

So I don’t know if I will do it, but I am considering setting up a tor middle relay on AWS free tier. I have been asking their support tem regarding how much traffic one can push and remain free tier, their response was:

If your microservice application is using an RDS or Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) database, the Lambda-to-database traffic will be free if it’s in the same region, including if VPC peering is used.
Traffic to databases in a different region will incur a regional transfer fee of $0.09 per GB for both the Lambda and database egress traffic. Ingress traffic is free for both."

I am wondering does anyone else run tor middle relays on AWS free tier, and what is the best torrc configuration to use for keeping the inbound and outbound traffic in free tier in case I do go fourth with this?

Thanks.

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–Keifer

2

Hi Keifer,

AWS EC2 charges for egress traffic (although ingress is free). For Relays, you will generally have about the same amount of ingress and egress traffic. The free tier has 100G/month free. After that, you need to pay for the “egress to internet” rate, which is “First 10 TB / Month, $0.09 per GB”. You can choose to limit your relay to use only 100G/month, see “Monthly Outbound Traffic” section at https://community.torproject.org/relay/relays-requirements/

Please also check out AWS Lightsail, which has free 1-4TB traffic allowance per server. However, note that Lightsail charges for both ingress and egress towards this monthly allowance.

I encourage you to check a few other cloud providers for their free tier monthly traffic allowance. For example, Oracle Cloud has 10TB/month…

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Yours sincerely, Xiaoqi Chen