UPDATE (October 2026): Read this before acting on anything below.
This post was written in January 2016 and describes running a Tor exit relay. The technical content is mostly still accurate, but the legal and operational environment around exit relays has changed materially, and the advice below is no longer the advice I would give.
What changed. Since 2016, Tor exit-relay operators have faced raids, equipment seizure and police contact in several jurisdictions. German police raided exit-relay operators in 2017 and again in August 2024, including home and office searches and seizure of hardware. An exit relay is, by design, the point where other people’s traffic emerges onto the open internet carrying your IP address — so abuse complaints, and in the worst case a knock at the door, land on you rather than on the user.
What I’d point readers to instead. If you want to help the Tor network without that exposure, run a middle relay (non-exit) — it carries essentially none of the legal risk and the network needs them — or run Snowflake, which lets you contribute bandwidth from a browser or a small always-on device with no relay to operate at all.
- Tor Project — Relay Operations (the current home of relay guidance)
- Types of relays — how middle, exit and bridge relays differ
- Snowflake — contribute bandwidth without running a relay
- Tor Metrics — live network statistics (replaces the dead counter linked below)
- Tor Project — abuse and complaints if you do get a notice
On the relays described below: I no longer operate Tor exit relays. No relay described in this post is running today. I’ve left the original text intact as an accurate record of what I wrote at the time — please don’t read it as current advice.
We’re all being monitored online in some way – that’s no surprise or secret. Many of us, myself included are not particularly concerned about this for most day to day things. We might not be doing anything “wrong” by the laws of our country so we go about our online business without much of a second thought.
For many people around the world this is not the case. Numerous governments create environments where online freedom is curtailed and censorship rules. They may restrict access to news, communication tools or even specific topics by keyword and will often punish people who attempt to access such information.
For the last few months I’ve been experimenting with hosting Tor relays on some virtual private servers across the internet as a way of helping to provide channels for people to access information and communicate more freely.
