You shouldn't run a relay from home, because 1. Residential connections are pretty slow to begin with. 2. It destroys one of Tor's best features, concealing the fact that you use Tor. Your IP address will be in publicly accessible lists like http://torstatus.blutmagie.de 3. Many web sites indiscriminately block all Tor relay IP addresses, irrespective of whether they are exit nodes, so you are likely to find your own web browsing to be blocked. However, I will answer your questions. You should port forward 9001. If you allowed you relay to be a directory server, you should port forward 9030 as well. Check onion icon -> Message Log -> Advanced tab for messages about whether your relay is accessible by others. It does some self-testing. 443 is better because it's the standard HTTPS port so it's harder for censoring governments to block that port without breaking lots of web sites. That's correct, although you may not see much traffic for a day or more, while clients are learning about your relay. You also might not see much traffic at all if your bandwidthrate is really low (like below 100 KB). Rent a VPS.