Ran a small onion site for a couple years and the nice part is you never touch a public IP or a cert. Downside is onion v3 addresses are impossible to share verbally and the latency makes anything chatty feel broken. Static pages only, honestly.

Nice thing is you skip port forwarding entirely, which matters a lot if your ISP has you behind CGNAT. Curious how people handle uptime though, since a hidden service going down isn't something you notice until someone tells you.

Agreed yeah. Mine has been up with no issues so far for ~half a year.

(There are solutions for CGNAT - https://david.alvarezrosa.com/posts/self-hosting-behind-cgna...)

What is the benefit of building the same website twice with different hostnames instead of using relative links to content on the same domain?

Website impersonation/fronting is a big problem in onionland, this at least makes fronters need to take more effort.

Besides accessing your page are random people able to use your server as an exit node? Am I thinking the right thing... I met someone in Switzerland that was hosting anonymous exit nodes to some anonymous network and he said that it was a pain having to explain what was happening to the police.

You probably want to add the Onion-Location header to the clearnet site so Tor Browser can automatically inform the visitor about it: https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/advanced/oni...

Good call, I'd missed that. Adding it now, thanks.

Imagine if normal people could install a single normal application and just run a website from a folder. CLI makes it more difficult than hosting a normal website. Typing commands you don't understand doesn't seem all that of a great idea.

If you don't understand what a command does, go learn it.

Besides using a separate port, I would also suggest running the hidden service on a non-127.0.0.1 bind address, just in case you ever host something else on that port and forget to disable the hidden service:

HiddenServicePort 80 127.13.37.1:8080

listen 127.13.37.1:8080;

This way, strangers won't be able to connect to a service bound to 127.0.0.1, should you ever decide to re-use the port and forget to disable the hidden service.

You'll also need to use separate ports and/or bind addresses if you host multiple hidden services and don't want people to correlate them - if nginx doesn't match the Host header, it will serve whichever site comes first alphabetically.

It's also possible to use a Unix socket, which can have a descriptive pathname like /var/run/my-service.sock: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69313114/using-nginx-to-...

using unix socket rather than tcp has advantages

Can you elaborate?

For starters, it’s twice as fast

My open source project (https://github.com/du82/nonograph) spawns a Tor hidden service with Onion-Location advertising by default, and on the Docker container its always on and self-healing

A few more tips.

1. If you want to improve page load speed you need to buy a HTTPS certificate so you are not limited to HTTP/1.1. Multiplexing in HTTP/2 is important for getting sites to load fast.

2. You can set the HiddenServiceExportCircuitID configuration to pass the circuit id to your web server for telemetry or anti abuse purposes. Otherwise your logs will say that all users are coming from the same IP.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-onion-service

Fascinating, onion services are always encrypted by the tor network but still tunnel "cleartext" http inside that, and there are no CAs that issue free of charge certificates for .onion domains, and therefore there's no free of charge way to get http/2 on onion services without self signing.

Which raises the question: why not just trust self-signed certificates on onion services? From my brief look it seems to be because the Tor project views the primary purposes of HTTPS on onion services to be other things rather than just http/2 support: http/2 isn't even mentioned on their page about https for onion services (https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/advanced/htt...). Unfortunate.

I personally would support automatically trusting self signed https certs since their key is typically secured under the same safety as the hidden service's key. And even when they are not the browser has no warning when you get downgraded to HTTP on an onion compared to a regular site.

Trying to push hidden services to stay on HTTP is going against what the rest of the web is doing and as a minority of web traffic it really should be aligned to the rest of the web and also require HTTPS. Yes, it's technically wasteful, but reduces both work and security risk by keeping security models aligned with the rest of the web.

Who would issue the certificates?

The "self" in "self-signed" means "you"

Can you buy one of these in XMR?

What I really love about Onion sites is that if they are big enough, performance engineering really becomes Tor-specific. A few examples:

- Making assets embedded as base64 (img src the header logo as base64, all CSS should be inline, etc.).

- Leveraging CSS as much as possible (if you use animations and transitions, use CSS as much as possible for these, avoid JS for them).

- Make sure your website is mostly rendered on the backend. If you're to have JS, your website should work without it.

- Security becomes REALLY fun, as in, avoid XSS, CSRF, SQL Injection attacks and any other injections as much as possible.

As someone summarizes in another comment[0], keep the chattiness as minimal as possible. By chattiness I understand they mean, pack as much data as you can in the same Keep-Alive connection. Avoid making new HTTP requests as much as possible, as each one might get assigned to a new Onion route making things slow.

If you can ship your website to the browser in a single connection, you've won.

I've always been impressed by performance of these big Onion sites, they really push the limits of software engineering creativity, given these constraints and nature of Tor.

--

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49872320

EDIT: Formatting of bullet points.

Are these simply good ideas regardless of tor?

Not really. The latency between a client and clearnet sites is tiny, and splitting assets in to separate resources makes caching work better.

Also DDoS becomes a problem, and the ways it's done are pretty specific to Tor. Double captchas are necessary when you're getting DDoSed, due to performance reasons. Oh, and captchas are also pretty specific to Tor as well.

There's also a problem of site fronting. Anyone could run a proxy pretending to be you, for arbitrary reasons (not even necessarily the obvious forging and credential stealing). Every site, even a personal blog, has dozens of parasitic fronts, either actively malicious or dormant. You need off-site ways to tell users what is the real address, and provide a smoke test for them (often a part of the address as a picture, for example in a captcha).

avoid JS for them

Using any JS defies the point and makes your site instantly suspicious.

How are captchas done?

There's also a problem of site fronting. Anyone could run a proxy pretending to be you, for arbitrary reasons (not even necessarily the obvious forging and credential stealing). Every site, even a personal blog, has dozens of parasitic fronts, either actively malicious or dormant. You need off-site ways to tell users what is the real address, and provide a smoke test for them (often a part of the address as a picture, for example in a captcha).

How can you do this without relying on the normal web? Let’s say you use a normal website to show the onion link, if the website gets taken down, you lost your user-trusted mean to do that.

Your users should have bookmarked it

The one thing I learned from hosting superkuhbitj6tul.onion (from a home computer) for ham radio and science stuff for about a decade was that EVERYTHING ON A .ONION IS EPHEMERAL. When the tor project correctly decided that for high security torv2 no longer was anonymous enough they unilaterally wiped out every torv2 .onion site that existed. Every link that was made between these sites came to an end in 2021 when they released a tor client without support for torv2 onions and tore the web to pieces.

Know this: the "dark web" is not for people who just want to own your domain name. It's for SECURITY and that use case is going to drive all their decisions. And if it wipes out every community in the entire tor dark web? So be it. And they'll do it again. Don't build your communities on the sand that is the dark web. You won't like the result.

I like the idea of TOR, but whenever I used it, I hit a speed penalty.

This, in turn, handicaps me searching for information. If they could fix this problem then I would be more likely to make use of TOR. We really need to think long-term about a future web that isn't ruined by Google etc... while also not being locked down such as via age-gating.