I am running a couple of relays. There are no costs if your servers have spare resources available. The tor daemon barely eats anything, and you can always limit how much bandwidth it's allowed to use. Please spend half an hour and set up a relay if you can, it doesn't help as much as running an exit node, but it's still something.
Thanks for doing that! I think a viable long term strategy to increase the health of the Tor network, is to increase the number of relays (not exit nodes) and make it easier for companies/websites to expose their services as native Tor services. That way the amount of bandwidth insides the Tor network would increase, without exposing anyone to increased liability.
I know you get a lot of hassle/blocking if you're a Tor exit node - do you get some of the same problems being a middle relay, just by virtue of appearing in lists of tor nodes?
Which country do you operate in? One issue in some of the Western world is that your IP becomes blacklisted by some websites. There's also the issue that some ISPs cut you off for running a relay (yes, not an exit node).
I've been running a relay for ~9 months, and have been blocked by a few websites, but it's fairly limited (I honestly can't remember the last time I ran into an issue).
