Ablative to begin offering Multihop Virtual Private Servers, Multihop Only Free Web Hosting and Bring Your Own .onion

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.

Following the loss of Daniels Hosting we introduced our Free Tier Ablative.Website, whilst this was warmly received the #1 request was to not have a clearnet domain.

Reflecting on the past few years of operation I realised that I wouldn’t purchase managed web hosting (preferring instead to configure my own server) and that the clearnet is too susceptible to censorship / surveillance.

With this in mind; Ablative Hosting is changing.

Multihop Virtual Private Servers

By the end of Q1 2021 you will be able to rent a virtual machine with 512Mb, 1024Mb or 2048Mb of RAM, this server will only be accessible via a .onion. By default it will have ports 22, 80 and 443 mapped.

You will have root access (via doas by default).

The server can have outbound IPv6 Internet access or be configured for Quad Hop.

Free Multihop Only Web Hosting

For every person who created an Ablative.Website .onion we had eight ask for a .onion only version.

We’ve listened and Multihop Only Web Hosting will be added to Ablative.Website.

We’ll also be making PHP and MySQL available to all Ablative.Website accounts.

Bring Your Own .Onion [Beta]

Since day 1 we have advised against giving us the private keys for your .onion. This advice has not changed.

What has changed is that OnionBalance now supports v3 .onion’s!.

You can opt to configure your Ablative Multihop VPS as an OnionBalance backend. You will need to run OnionBalance elsewhere but we will never have access to the private keys for your .onion but we will be hosting it!

We will also be making it easier for people to import their own .onion without needing to use OnionBalance but shall continue to recommend against it.

We want your feedback

The team would really appreciate some feedback on these changes so please drop by our IRC server irc://hzwjmjimhr7bdmfv2doll4upibt5ojjmpo3pbp5ctwcg37n3hyk7qzid.onion:6667/ablative, send an email to sales@ablative.hosting or send a Tweet to @AblativeHosting.