Sponsoring a Server

freenode is a service of Peer-Directed Projects Center, a small not-for-profit organization in the United States. PDPC depends on the help of individual and institutional sponsors to provide hardware and bandwidth for the freenode network. For more information, please see below.

Institutional Sponsors

freenode needs solid, well-connected servers. In addition to conventional hidden hubs and public leaf servers, we're particularly interested in finding servers which can be used for Tor hidden leaf nodes. We're looking for corporate, educational or not-for-profit institutional sponsors.

Network connections should be multihomed, T3 or better, in order to ensure high reliability and low latency. Actual bandwidth usage runs about 45-75Kbits/sec average for hubs, and 450-750Kbits/sec average for leaf nodes. This comes to 15-25 gigabytes per month for hubs and 150-250 gigabytes per month for leaf nodes. With occasional exceptions, servers should be dedicated to freenode use and it should be anticipated that PDPC volunteer staff will participate in server administration. IRC service daemons are administered remotely via ssh and scp.

Hosting candidates are reminded that the utility of any given server depends on ping latencies and other factors which may be beyond our control. Servers may need to be delinked or rehubbed at any time. We cannot always provide notice before a server is delinked. Regardless, sponsoring a freenode server helps the network and the community and we appreciate that you're considering it.

For information on server requirements, please check here. For information on how to apply to submit a server, please see here.

Thank you for supporting freenode!