When Ablative.Hosting first launched in 2017 the plan was to provide clearnet website operators the option to also have a .onion with little to no fuss (along with the usual features of free SSL, managed patching etc etc). The takeup of Single Hop or Shared Single Hop accounts pales in comparison to the constant battle to keep a stock of hypervisor servers provisioned to keep pace with the demand for Multihop Hosting accounts.

QuadHop is mentioned several times on our website but we’ve never explained what QuadHop is. If you are unfamiliar with how .onion services interact with rendezvous points and directories then it would be a good idea to check the Tor Project’s .onion service explainer first. Most operators will run the Tor daemon on the same server as their service daemon (e.g. nginx) and may make mistakes that allow the server to expose the IP addresses on other interfaces, expose fingerprints (e.

At Ablative Hosting we prefer to use .onion networking everywhere we can. .onion’s ensure that our web properties can never be blocked, our employees can trust the end-to-end nature of the connectivity, our endpoints aren’t exposed in Certificate Transparency Logs. Most importantly; Tor prevents adversaries from tapping the upstream of our metrics or log servers and trivially discovering the IP addresses of all our other servers (or employees) when they connect.

With the sad loss of Daniel’s Hosting the .onion hosting ecosystem has lost a home for ~7600 sites. Whilst Ablative.Hosting is a commercial venture it is one with the aim of assisting people to resist Internet censorship. If you can’t afford a VPS, an always on Internet connection, a domain or our MHO512 service then the lack of access to finance is a form of censorship. Free shouldn’t mean co-operation with surveillance capitalism machinery, Free shouldn’t mean having to hand over personal details or content rights.

Did you know that Ablative.Hosting has a .onion only IRCd? Available at irc.hzwjmjimhr7bdmfv2doll4upibt5ojjmpo3pbp5ctwcg37n3hyk7qzid.onion/6667 this IRC server is available for anyone interested in .onion technology whether they are a customer or not. There’s usually one or two members of staff luking in #ablative and we’ll happily help you with any .onion technical queries without a sales pitch! We don’t support services such as NickServ or ChanServ at the moment (mainly as we’re only expecting people to drop in to ask questions / get support for a problem rather than spend any sustained period of time here).