[tor] Website feedback from someone that's not me.

Andy Isaacson adi at hexapodia.org
Fri Sep 16 08:35:34 UTC 2011


Thanks for forwarding this, Rubin.  Definitely some good stuff in there.

I didn't put the "where does the money go?" answer on the front page, to
avoid making it too cluttered.  It's on the FAQ, which is the first
link; it probably should be more prominent that the answer is out there.

I'd love to have the live cha-ching graph from
http://cha-ching.noisebridge.net/noisetor show up on
http://tor.noisebridge.net
as well as a live bandwidth graph.

It costs us about $800 per month to run our current 500 Mbps node; once
it's fully up to speed, it'll push somewhere in the 100 - 150 TB/month
range.  So $27 runs us for a day, $200 for a week.  If you ran this on
EC2 that bandwidth would cost something like $5000 - $10,000 each month.

Tor inherently ramps high-bandwidth nodes slowly; we're up to 80 Mbps as
of today, and based on previous experience it'll take most of the rest
of the month to push past 300 Mbps.

It's quite a bit more efficient to pay towards a large node like
tor.noisebridge.net, rather than running a small or medium sized node on
a Linode or EC2 or whatever.  However if you have such a VPS anyways,
running Tor with a lower bandwidth limit -- even as low as 200 Kbit/sec
-- is great for the network, because it provides another node for
censored users to connect to.

We've updated our software to work around the recent Iran block.

And, a bunch of the info your interlocutor requested is info we didn't
have until quite recently!  It's good to know what people want to know,
though.

-andy



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