Looking for a Tor relay friendly VPS? Middle relays and bridges — including obfs4 — are an explicitly welcome use of a HushVPS server, not a grey area you have to hide. Sign up with no ID, pay in Monero, and give bandwidth back to the network without attaching your name to it.
The Tor network is only as strong as the volunteers who run its relays, and too many of those volunteers spend their first hour fighting a hosting provider that buries Tor in a vague "no proxies" clause. A Tor relay friendly VPS should make the opposite promise: run the node, publish your contact info, and get on with it.
HushVPS is built for exactly this. Our whole model — anonymous signup, Monero payment, minimal data — already matches how relay operators think about their infrastructure. A relay is a public good you contribute quietly; a host that demands your ID and a credit card to run one rather defeats the point. Here you spin up a Debian or Ubuntu box, install the Tor package, set a few config lines, and you are carrying traffic for people who need it — in some cases people whose safety depends on it.
This page covers the honest specifics: what a relay, a bridge, and an exit each actually do; which of them are unambiguously allowed here; how much bandwidth a relay realistically wants; and where the acceptable-use line sits. If you want the wider product context first, start with the anonymous VPS overview, or if you are hosting an onion service rather than relaying, see our onion hosting page.
These three roles look similar in the config file but carry very different real-world exposure. Choosing the right one is the single most important decision before you deploy.
Passes encrypted traffic between other Tor nodes and never connects out to the open internet on anyone's behalf. It sees neither who the user is nor where they're going. Lowest exposure of the three.
Explicitly allowed here
An unlisted entry relay that helps people inside censored networks reach Tor at all. With the obfs4 pluggable transport its traffic is disguised so filters can't easily spot and block it. High impact, low abuse profile.
Explicitly allowed here
The final hop that connects out to public sites, so its IP shows up in those sites' logs and attracts abuse complaints and legal notices. The most demanding role to run responsibly.
Middle relays & obfs4 bridges welcome · exit nodes not permitted for now — ask us.
If you're new to relay operation, the Tor Project's own relay guide plus our walkthrough on how to run a Tor relay on a VPS cover the full setup, from installing the package to registering your ContactInfo.
Relays are light on CPU, disk, and RAM but hungry for steady, sustained throughput. Sizing your box is really about sizing your bandwidth.
Each plan includes a monthly transfer allowance, from 2 TB on Phantom to 16 TB on Revenant. Tor's RelayBandwidthRate, RelayBandwidthBurst, and AccountingMax directives let you cap the relay so it fits comfortably inside whichever plan you chose and never overruns.
You don't need a 10 Gbit monster to help. A relay rate-limited to sit inside a 2 TB month is still a real, measured contribution — the network is built from thousands of modest nodes, not a handful of giant ones. Start on Phantom and grow if you want to give more.
Tor is largely single-threaded per relay, but a busy node benefits from extra CPU for TLS and lets you run a couple of relay instances on one host. If you want a genuinely fast relay, Wraith or Revenant give you the cores and the 8–16 TB of transfer to feed them.
Every plan runs a relay or bridge equally well — the difference is how much bandwidth you want to donate. All ship with full root, IPv4 + IPv6, and the same no-ID, XMR-only checkout.
The natural starter relay or obfs4 bridge — rate-limit it to fit and it still strengthens the network.
The comfortable middle-relay box — 4 TB of transfer means a healthy consensus weight without babysitting.
For a genuinely fast relay, or two relay instances on one host, with 8 TB to keep them fed.
A high-capacity contribution — the cores and the 16 TB to run a heavy, high-weight relay for the network.
Prices are shown in USD and charged in Monero at the rate locked on your invoice. Cycle and spec details live on the full pricing page.
The habits that make a good relay operator — separate identity, minimal footprint, no unnecessary trust — are the same ones HushVPS is designed around.
Middle relays and bridges are named, welcome workloads here. You won't find Tor tucked into a hostile "no anonymising proxies" clause, and you don't have to disguise the traffic or open a support ticket to ask if it's okay. Publish your ContactInfo with confidence.
Relay operators are volunteers, and many prefer their contribution stay separate from their legal identity. Monero settles the invoice while concealing sender, receiver, and amount — so the payment funding your relay isn't the thread that unravels its anonymity.
We ask for no name, no document, and no card. Nothing links "the person" to "the relay," because we never collected the person — your account is a pseudonymous username. You manage the box through that account and a random order token, with nothing tied to your identity.
A middle relay never exits to the open internet, so it doesn't generate the abuse complaints exits attract — and we don't treat encrypted relay traffic as suspicious. If a real issue ever comes up, we reach you through your order token first rather than pulling the box on an automated flag.
Running privacy infrastructure and respecting an acceptable-use policy are not in tension — they're the whole point. HushVPS welcomes relays and bridges precisely because they carry traffic without becoming a tool for harm.
Our acceptable-use policy is unchanged for relay operators: no CSAM, no malware distribution, no spam operations, and no network attacks such as DDoS launched from your box. A middle relay can't do those things on your behalf — it only forwards encrypted traffic between Tor nodes — so operating one sits comfortably inside the rules. What we prohibit is the abuse of a server, not the act of donating bandwidth to a censorship-resistance network. That's the difference between privacy and lawlessness, and it's the line we hold on every plan.
Exit nodes are a separate conversation because they connect out to the public internet under your server's IP. If exits are something you want to run, treat the exit-policy note above as the open question and reach out before you deploy so we can confirm what's possible and where. For middle relays and obfs4 bridges, there's nothing to confirm — deploy away.
RelayBandwidthRate and AccountingMax so it never overruns your allowance. A modest relay rate-limited to fit comfortably inside 2 TB still meaningfully strengthens the network.Pick a plan, pay in Monero, and have a middle relay or obfs4 bridge carrying traffic within the hour — or read the setup guide first.