Donate bandwidth to Tor.
From a Nordic uplink that does not know your name.

Yes. Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland all treat Tor-relay operation as ordinary internet-infrastructure activity: there is no licensing requirement, no registration obligation, and a long body of operator precedent (Bahnhof, Pionen, university CS departments, Riseup-aligned collectives) running relays publicly without legal friction. The Tor Project's own legal FAQ lists Sweden as a friendly jurisdiction for relays. What this page describes is middle and guard relays — non-exit nodes that never originate traffic toward the public internet, which is the safest legal posture for a first-time operator.

Not as your first relay, and not on a single-operator VPS without supporting infrastructure. Exit relays do originate traffic toward the public internet — which means abuse reports about that traffic land in your inbox, even though the underlying user is upstream of you. Run exits when you have a dedicated abuse-handling email, a written legal opinion for your jurisdiction, ideally a non-profit wrapper (Torservers.net, an EFF-style entity, or a university group), and your own AS-level relationship with the host. NordBastion is happy to host middle and guard relays at any tier; exits are a conversation, not a checkbox.

A healthy Garrison-hosted middle relay sustains roughly 30–60 Mbps once the Tor consensus has learned to trust it (~1 week ramp-up). That works out to 10–20 TB per month, in and out, symmetrically. NordBastion's 1 Gbps unmetered uplink absorbs this without a flinch — for context, the same 16 TB/month of egress would cost roughly $1,440/month on AWS EC2's default transfer pricing. The unmetered policy is the single biggest reason hobbyist relay operators end up on hosters like us rather than on the hyperscalers.

For a middle relay: practically never, because middle relays do not originate any traffic toward the public internet — only encrypted Tor traffic to the next relay in the circuit. For a guard relay: rare, because guards see only the first hop in. NordBastion's abuse desk understands the difference and will not forward generic "your IP was in a scan" auto-reports about a published middle relay; we will reach out to you for anything that looks substantive, which in practice is almost nothing.

Tor lets a single operator declare that several relays belong to the same operational family via the MyFamily torrc directive. The consensus then refuses to build circuits that traverse two relays of the same family — preventing one operator from de-anonymising their own users by accident. If you grow from one relay to two or three, declaring MyFamily is mandatory; it costs nothing and it is the difference between a thoughtful operator and a careless one.

The torrc directives. A middle relay is the default — ORPort set, ExitRelay 0, no DirPort needed. A guard is a middle that has accumulated enough uptime and bandwidth for the directory authorities to flag it Guard automatically; you do not opt into being a guard, the network promotes you. An exit relay sets ExitRelay 1 and an ExitPolicy. The hardware is the same; the legal exposure is not.

Yes — Nyx is a curses-based monitor that runs in a tmux session over SSH and gives you live bandwidth, circuit count, uptime and consensus weight. For longer-term graphs, the Tor Project's metrics.torproject.org page indexes every published relay by fingerprint, so you can bookmark your own and watch the consensus weight climb over the first two weeks. No public HTTP dashboard is required, which is the right default for a relay.

Irrelevant for middle and guard relays — they do not originate traffic, so they never touch port 25 in either direction. For exit relays, the standard reduced exit policy explicitly closes port 25 (anti-spam abuse is the single largest source of operator complaints), and we recommend honouring that. NordBastion does open port 25 for legitimate mail-server use cases, but on a relay box you want it closed at the application layer regardless of platform policy.