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Comment by the_stc | Hacker News Reader

Being undiscoverable is a big help. For our ancillary services, we're taken to using Tor2Web to auth mode HS servers because some random domain is less likely to look interesting for people to poke at. Publishing a .onion, especially with some general-purpose software hosted on it screams that there is something of interest there.

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Gotta be the change you want to see. None of my hidden service .onion sites are anything "of interest". They're just electronics and radio hobby stuff like the web has always had.

Put everything on Tor as a hidden service and eventually the stigma will go away.

This is on the front page now right next to a story about how hostile and ad-ridden most commercial websites have become. Thank you for helping keep the original spirit of the web alive on onion space.

Do you have a guide to doing that? I would love to host some stuff on Tor just because.

Here you go: https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en

It's dead easy. Setup a web server basically like normal, but make sure it's listening only on loopback if that's important to you.

Then install tor, and add a couple of lines to the torrc and restart tor.

    HiddenServiceDir /usr/local/etc/tor/hidden_service/
    HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8080

The keypair will be generated and you'll find the onion address in /usr/local/etc/tor/hidden_service/hostname, and it'll forward all traffic to 127.0.0.1:8080.

You can run as many hidden services as you like on the same tor instance, with different onion addresses, and forwarding to different places.

How have you found long term maintenance of running these services? ie, running into random breakage and spending time debugging the system vs an nginx box or something... Is it set-it-and-forget-it type of system?

I've always wanted to set up onion addresses but I'm always wary to open up a new bag of worms for my personal projects.

The fact it sounds so easy is encouraging.

Yes, it's set-and-forget. It still runs nginx, it's basically the same as running a clearnet site.

I've not experienced any random breakages.

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