Sometimes I’m asked if the NTP Pool really needs more servers. The answer is yes, always!

While the number of servers has grown nicely over the years, so has the number of users so we need

The only (tricky) requirement is that you have a static IP address and expect the server (and IP) to be around for a long time. ntpd doesn’t deal well with changing IP addresses (yet), so this is important.

How much traffic to expect?

It really depends on which country you are in; but you can heavily regulate it with the “netspeed” setting in the server settings on the manage page. As a rule of thumb you’ll get 1/3 query a second “per megabit”; with peaks of about 1 to 1.5 queries per second per megabit at the top of each hour (yeah, lots of people are unhelpfully synchronizing their time at the hour each hour). Each packet is only about 50 bytes, so this is very little traffic. If you set the netspeed to for example 1 mbit (the default) you’ll get very little traffic but still help tens of thousands of users a day set their time.

In some countries you might get more queries; but that just means that the need for your server is greater in that country!