HACKER Q&A
📣 lopkeny12ko

Donating Residential Internet Bandwidth?


I am currently paying a lot for a residential symmetric gigabit link (1 GB/s up and down), with no data caps. I'm seeking ways to "donate" or otherwise make good use of this bandwidth I'm paying for.

I run a few seedboxes, a Tor relay, and a SyncThing relay, among other smaller servers. My network metrics indicate I only use about a 1 TB per day. Assuming 100% utilization, the theoretical maximum data transfer I can sustain is about 10.5 TB each of download and upload, per day. So I am only utilizing less than 5% of the bandwidth I'm paying for, which feels extremely wasteful!

HN, what are some good ways to donate this spare bandwidth? Ideally workloads that are purely network-bound and won't wear out my disks.


  👤 scrps Accepted Answer ✓
Could look into mirroring something like a package repo for a linux distro. Could offer devs of any software you use free hosting. Host any number of services like mastodon or searx, etc.

Two things to remember is legal liability and security, I host some things on my connection but everything is piped in via proxy from a cheap VPS and is throttled and has a clamp least badness happen. As for liability I'd read up on local laws, it gets tricky.