Put your website on the Dark Web
About this video
A hands-on tutorial in two tiers for putting content on the Tor network. The easy tier uses OnionShare, available for Windows, Mac, Linux and mobile, to host an ephemeral website, run an anonymous chat, or share and receive files without opening any router ports. Once connected to Tor, OnionShare generates an onion address and, unless the public option is checked, a private key visitors must enter in Tor Browser; stopping the share makes the site disappear. He explains the model with a rendezvous analogy: the visitor and host never learn each other’s IP address because traffic passes through multiple encrypted onion relays and meets in the middle. The advanced tier builds a permanent site on a Linux machine, preferably Ubuntu, in the cloud, at home, or on a VM. He clones a sample site, installs Nginx, copies a portfolio site into /var/www, points the Nginx default root at it, then installs Tor from the Tor Project repositories after identifying his Debian version. Uncommenting the hidden-service lines in torrc and restarting Tor creates a hidden service whose hostname file under /var/lib/tor reveals the onion address. Finally he builds the mkp224o tool from source to brute-force a vanity v3 address starting with a chosen word such as ‘chuck’, noting that each extra character takes much longer, copies the generated keys over the hidden-service files, and restarts Tor to serve the site at the custom address.
Key takeaways
- OnionShare is the beginner route: one tool can host a temporary website, run anonymous chat, and send or receive files over Tor, with an optional private key or a public address.
- Tor hosting hides both sides: traffic routes through multiple encrypted relays and meets at a rendezvous point, so neither host nor visitor exposes an IP address and no port forwarding is needed.
- A permanent onion site is just a normal web server plus Tor: serve the site with Nginx first, confirm it works on port 80, then add Tor as a hidden service.
- Enabling the hidden service in torrc and restarting Tor generates the address and keys, stored in the hidden_service folder under /var/lib/tor, with the address in the hostname file.
- Vanity onion addresses are brute-forced with mkp224o by generating addresses until one starts with the desired word; short prefixes like ‘chuck’ are quick, longer ones grow exponentially harder.
Episode details: published November 1, 2023 · 26:15 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.
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