High-Bandwidth Tor Relay VPS Hosting

The Tor network is bottlenecked far more by aggregate bandwidth than by raw relay count. A single 1 Gbps middle relay can serve more circuits than fifty small home relays on residential connections. Tor's directory authorities measure each relay's advertised bandwidth and consensus weight, and they preferentially route circuits through fast, stable nodes. By contributing a 1 Gbps offshore relay you are directly increasing the network's usable capacity, which lowers latency for every Tor user and makes traffic analysis attacks harder by spreading load across diverse autonomous systems.

AnubizHost nodes in Iceland and Romania sit on ASNs that are not already saturated with Tor traffic, which improves the consensus weight assigned by the bandwidth authorities. This means your relay contributes meaningfully from the day it joins the network rather than spending weeks ramping up. We do not throttle outbound to 95th percentile billing and there is no per-month traffic cap on the relay plans, so a properly tuned tor daemon can saturate the uplink continuously without surprise charges or contract violations.

Running a non-exit middle relay is widely considered low-risk from a legal standpoint. You are not the originating IP for any outbound traffic visible to third parties. Your IP appears in the public consensus, but abuse complaints almost never reach middle-relay operators because there is no exit traffic correlation. Iceland and Romania both have local case law and ISP precedent acknowledging middle relays as legitimate infrastructure.

Tor is single-threaded per instance, so CPU clock speed matters more than core count. For a 1 Gbps relay we recommend 2 vCPU minimum and 4 GB RAM, which lets you run two tor instances bound to the same IP on adjacent ORPorts. This doubles effective relay throughput because each daemon can handle roughly 400 to 600 Mbps of crypto-bound traffic on modern Xeon hardware. Use the NumCPUs directive in torrc to pin each daemon to its own core and avoid context-switch penalties at peak load.

RAM usage scales with the number of active circuits, which on a busy 1 Gbps relay can reach 30,000 to 50,000 concurrent connections. Set MaxMemInQueues to roughly 2 GB per daemon and monitor the heartbeat log lines for OOM-killed warnings during the first week. Disable accounting unless you genuinely want a soft cap, because AccountingMax adds bookkeeping overhead with no benefit on unmetered links.

Filesystem choice matters at the margin. The tor directory cache writes consensus documents frequently and benefits from ext4 with noatime mounted on an SSD-backed volume. AnubizHost offshore plans use NVMe storage across the catalog, so cache writes never become the bottleneck. Disable swap or set vm.swappiness to 1, because paging tor's working set during a circuit burst will produce visible latency spikes that affect every user routed through your node.

Operating an anonymous relay is meaningful only if the operator itself is not trivially deanonymized through the hosting provider. AnubizHost accepts BTC, ETH, XMR and USDT through self-custodial payment rails with no KYC requirement at signup. The account email can be a Tutanota, Proton or similar privacy address, and we do not require government identification for any VPS or relay product. The billing record contains only the account email and the crypto transaction hash, which has no link to a real-world identity unless the operator chose to create one.

At the hypervisor level we do not retain access logs, traffic captures or packet headers for VPS customer traffic beyond what is required for live abuse triage. There is no historical netflow archive that a third party could subpoena to correlate your relay's circuits with downstream connections. The disk image of your VPS is encrypted at rest on the host node, and we do not maintain a backup of customer disks unless you explicitly enable the optional snapshot service.

Jurisdiction completes the picture. Iceland is outside the Five, Nine and Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangements and has constitutional protections for press and source confidentiality. Romania is an EU member but does not have mandatory data retention for VPS operators after the 2014 CJEU ruling. Both jurisdictions have local operators and lawyers with experience pushing back on overbroad legal requests, and AnubizHost coordinates with both pools where relevant.