They'll also generally send your onion address in the Host field. Q: How can I tell if someone is browsing my site / service using the hidden service?Ī: If you have access logs enabled, their IP address will appear as 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0. This means you can run a hidden service on almost all hosting providers without any complaints or abuse problems.

The only non-negligible traffic that the Tor node should generate, will be from serving requests to your visitors who are using your website's Hidden Service. By default, Tor comes with a locked down configuration with everything disabled, to ensure that when you install Tor, it only acts as a relay/exit if you specifically configure it to do so.Ī Tor node for just a hidden service acts as a client on the Tor network, it doesn't require any ports to be opened/forwarded, and it should produce only minimal background traffic. To run a hidden service, you DO NOT need to run a relay nor exit. This can be either due to the risk of getting your server's IP blacklisted by incompetent service administrators who blanket ban all IP addresses linked to Tor (including non-exit relays) - or due to the constant, high volume of traffic that a relay can generate. Some hosting providers may block Tor relays despite the fact they don't generate any abusive traffic. Hosting providers generally only disallow Tor exit nodes, which are Tor nodes that are configured to act as an open proxy for the Tor network, allowing anonymous traffic to flow through the Tor node's public IP address(es), which can include abusive traffic.

Q: I hear most hosts block Tor! Won't I get banned if I run Tor to add a hidden service to my site?

How to add a Tor Hidden Service (.onion) to your website running on Ubuntu/Debian Linux

Tor browser mac torrc file