Tor Middle Relay VPS in Romania

A middle relay sits between the guard and the exit. It never originates a connection to a public destination. From the perspective of any complaint sender (DMCA, CSAM hash-list operator, scraper-detection system) the middle relay is invisible: the egress IP is the exit's, the ingress is the guard's. We have run middle relays on Romanian VPS for years and the abuse-ticket count is zero.

This means an operator can run a middle relay under any identity, with any rDNS, without publishing ContactInfo if they prefer not to. We still recommend ContactInfo for directory-authority reachability, but it is not required for relay operation.

Useful middle-relay torrc on a 1 Gbps VPS:

ORPort 9001 IPv4Only
ORPort [::]:9001 IPv6Only
Nickname AnubizRelayBucharest01
ContactInfo abuse-tor@your-domain.example
ExitRelay 0
SocksPort 0
ControlPort 0
RelayBandwidthRate 100 MBytes
RelayBandwidthBurst 200 MBytes

Sysctl tweaks: increase fs.file-max to 200000, net.core.somaxconn to 4096, and net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range to 10000-65535. We apply these by default on relay-tagged orders.

New middle relays take 4 to 6 weeks to reach observed-bandwidth class plateau because directory authorities ramp the BandwidthAuthority measurement gradually to defend against weight manipulation. Expect 5 to 15 Mbps of advertised bandwidth for the first 14 days, climbing to 50 to 200 Mbps depending on actual usage. AES-NI matters here: without it, the relay's CPU caps out before the network does.

Relays are long-term commitments. We accept BTC and XMR with no monthly identity re-verification. Pay six months upfront for discount, or month-to-month with no penalty. Most Romania middle relays in our network are 18+ months old.

Related: Tor hosting parent, guard relay Romania, middle relay Iceland, v3 onion Romania, exit relay Romania.