[hnphillipj]

How do you anonymously host a service from your home computer? I'm new to all this.

I also checked out your site. I hope to be at your level of expertise one day.

[kodablah]

Onion (née hidden) services are easily hosted from any computer, even behind a NAT/ISP due to how it publishes its descriptor and relies on reachable relays for rendezvous. It's easy with the Tor executable and a torrc file, there are plenty of guides out there.

Even though you're new to all this, for others wanting to do this programmatically, there is Stem for Python and I've written one for Go [0]. It's such an easy self-hosting NAT traversal technique, I'm surprised it's not used more often in situations not requiring great bandwidth/latency (e.g. p2p chat).

0 - https://github.com/cretz/bine

[dredmorbius]

Inexpertly hosting onion services on your own premises, particularly if you're doing so out of a real fear of getting found out, is not recommended.

Talk to the Dread Pirate Roberts next time he's in the neighbourhood.

[mirimir]

OnionShare is a good choice.[0]

However, Tor is vulnerable to traffic analysis. And running a server, adversaries can easily modulate/fingerprint the traffic, which facilitates traffic analysis. If you can see the signal, and have taps on major AS, you can drill down to the server.

0) https://onionshare.org/

[bouncycastle]

A way I would pinpoint a hidden server would be to monitor different data center regions / networks for outages or congestion, while at the same time looking at the hidden server's ping reply. The response times alone can reveal a lot of information. Once I have the data center, I'm sure the data center admins can see which servers are using Tor, and help with pinpointing it further. No need for taps.

[sdwisely]

"Tor Hidden Services" are services hosted on the tor network and inaccessible outside it.

Hosts are assigned a dns name <id>.onion so clients can connect to that service.

[mirimir]

OK, I'm being picky, I know. But the .onion hostname has no relation to DNS. It's just the hash of the site's private key, truncated to 16 characters.

[bambataa]

Is it not fairly trivial to link that to you? How can you make it anonymous?

[pavel_lishin]

"Web services" are hosted on the internet and inaccessible outside it.

"Chat lines" are hosted on telephone networks and inaccessible outside it.