What to selfhost if you have a lot of bandwidth
from xana@lemmy.zip to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 07 Mar 01:02
https://lemmy.zip/post/60319478

Hello fellow TCP users.

I am currently having a lot of unused bandwidth. I wonder do you have any suggestion what to do with that bandwidth ?. Ideally it should more or less only relay the traffic because unfortunately I don’t have much idle RAM left (something like a Tor-relay node but least risky).

Thank you very much!

Edit: If you have any not so heavy torrent (<250GiB) that could be helpful please suggest as well.

Edit: Thank you for all the options you’ve suggested:

I will try to explore them. Thank you very much!

#selfhosted

threaded - newest

xxce2AAb@feddit.dk on 07 Mar 01:07 next collapse

Linux installer ISO images. Perfectly legal, and very helpful.

xana@lemmy.zip on 07 Mar 01:09 next collapse

A very good idea indeed. Do you mean via torrent or is there any way to host it ?

xxce2AAb@feddit.dk on 07 Mar 01:11 collapse

I had torrents in mind. You could host them directly I suppose, but discoverability would be an issue.

xana@lemmy.zip on 07 Mar 01:13 next collapse

thank you!

IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz on 07 Mar 01:20 collapse

Discoverability is one issue and trust for longevity is another. No bigger distribution is going to rely their official download links on an individual home lab which can disappear overnight. Also I guess there’s also guestion if images are provided as is without adding/removing your own ‘extensions’, but that’s what cheksums are for.

And this is obviously on a general level, I’m not trying to suggest that xana is not trustworthy :) But torrent seeding is a helpful thing for community, and easy/safe to set up.

xana@lemmy.zip on 07 Mar 01:24 collapse

No worry you can not trust a random guy on the internet in general. But one issue I see with torrent is I will have to update the torrent manually everytime a new version comes out. I wonder if you know any automatic solution for that ?

IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz on 07 Mar 01:44 collapse

I’d guess there’s some tools which rely on RSS feeds or something to update seeds automatically, but that’s just a gut feeling. Also it shouldn’t be too difficult to write your own, but I don’t know if anything ‘production ready’ is out there.

SlurpingPus@lemmy.world on 07 Mar 19:25 collapse

Torrents for the popular distros have lots of peers, so another seeder wouldn’t be adding much.

I avoid downloading isos via torrent, because when I tried, the client straight up froze for a while, dealing with over a thousand peers and sorting out connections.

xana@lemmy.zip on 07 Mar 23:17 collapse

Yeah it is true but seeding torrents to sature bandwith is generally a good idea

SlurpingPus@lemmy.world on 07 Mar 23:27 collapse

As a seasoned torrenter myself, I don’t observe the ‘≥1 ratio’ rule, but instead delete torrents that have enough seeders and keep those which have just a few. This maximizes utility for those who might want the same torrents as I did.

Of course, this inevitably runs into lack of endless disk space rather than bandwidth. And if you seed something other than Linux, you might want to research the authorities’ attitude toward that in your area.

mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 09 Mar 00:04 collapse

I just don’t tend to delete torrents at all. I have torrents going all the way back to when I built my current server, almost two years ago. Just set your bandwidth caps, and let the torrent client manage what to seed. Some of my shit is only like .1 ratio because it’s not popular or there are lots of other seeds… But I have a few others that have ratios in the literal hundreds. I think my most popular torrent is a PSX ISO bundle for emulators, and it’s currently sitting at a ratio of like 350.

pr3d@eviltoast.org on 07 Mar 01:24 next collapse

My snowflake-proxy docker container eats 81-95mb RAM atm.

xana@lemmy.zip on 07 Mar 01:25 collapse

I am curious how much bandwidth it comsumes a month ? And do you have any legal implication for doing that ?

ivn@tarte.nuage-libre.fr on 07 Mar 02:23 next collapse

Snowflake is an entrypoint into the tor network, not an exit point. I’m not a lawyer but I don’t think there are any legal implications, or maybe in Russia or Iran. And the whole point is that its traffic is very hard to identify.

pr3d@eviltoast.org on 07 Mar 05:30 next collapse

it logs out stats ever 6h. The last on my VPS were: 2,7 Gb IN and 120,5 Mb OUT. So in 30 Days it would be around 243 Gb IN and 10 Gb OUT Traffic.

And do you have any legal implication for doing that ?

i run it since years on two Hetzner VPS in Falkenstein, Germany and didn’t get any compains.

The security concerns for the Snowflake proxy operator are minimal. The Snowflake client will not be able to interact with your computer in any way or observe your network traffic, and you will not be able to see their traffic. From the perspective of your ISP it will look like you are connecting to a Tor bridge, which if you are running a Snowflake proxy should be legal and unrestricted in your country. There is no more risk running a Snowflake proxy than running Tor browser.

Source: eff.org/…/snowflake-makes-it-easy-anyone-fight-ce…

more @ snowflake.torproject.org

theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world on 07 Mar 07:52 collapse

There’s nothing illegal about using Tor, which was developed and published by the US Navy and supported by the US State Department. Like other users have said, this is not an exit node which is the only type of node that I would be concerned about running.

Definitely look into I2P which, in a nutshell, is a peer-to-peer version of Tor. Hosting an I2P router comes with no legal risk, too. Hosting an I2P outproxy would be similar to hosting a Tor exit node, so be aware of that.

Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz on 07 Mar 01:30 next collapse

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
IP Internet Protocol
NAT Network Address Translation

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

[Thread #144 for this comm, first seen 7th Mar 2026, 09:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

inari@piefed.zip on 08 Mar 00:41 collapse

Good bot

harmbugler@piefed.social on 07 Mar 01:35 next collapse

I2P outproxy or seeding torrents

aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works on 07 Mar 01:53 next collapse

You could consider peertube, although I am not terribly familiar with the hardware load

kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 07 Mar 03:25 next collapse

Look in to I2P.

talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world on 07 Mar 11:43 next collapse

I’ve not looked into it much yet, but radicle.xyz seems interesting.

It’s kinda a bittorrent-powerd codeberg and it looks like it’s worth playing around with (even though it might not get you rid of much bandwidth… IDK how popular it is, but source usually doesn’t weigh that much).

umbrella@lemmy.ml on 08 Mar 22:59 collapse

this is cool. we actually need more of this sort of thing as corporations clamp down on tech.

RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz on 07 Mar 12:10 next collapse

A Syncthing relay, very simple to set up, I always install it when I have no need for a VPS but it’s paid for until the end of the month

Nibodhika@lemmy.world on 07 Mar 12:48 next collapse

What do you mean unused bandwidth? Is that not the normal? Most of the time I’m not using my bandwidth so I guess I have lots of unused bandwidth too.

xana@lemmy.zip on 07 Mar 23:12 collapse

Well I’ve already paid for it so why not saturate it for the good of the community :D

linuxguy@piefed.ca on 07 Mar 12:50 next collapse

Why not a tor relay? If you’re not an exit it is pretty darn safe. How about a tor snowflake proxy too? Even easier and safer.

[deleted] on 09 Mar 04:10 collapse

.

hexagonwin@lemmy.today on 07 Mar 14:16 next collapse

archiveteam warrior

umbrella@lemmy.ml on 08 Mar 00:12 collapse

it doesn’t even require that much bandwidth. can very much be used in conjunction with other stuff.

umbrella@lemmy.ml on 08 Mar 23:00 next collapse

frontends like imginn invidious redlib and such

anaisrim@fedinsfw.app on 08 Mar 23:04 collapse

FediNSFW.