And I’d like to be able to do it privately too, that’d be cool.

Things I can do –

  • write HTML and CSS
  • register a domain and set up hosting
  • use Filezilla

Things I don’t know how to do –

  • Create databases, I always had someone around to do that for me
  • Self-host
  • Set up an onion site 🧅
  • Set up an eepsite
  • Register a .bit domain

I am more of a content gal than a tech gal, but think of all the cool stuff I could create if I could spin up anonymous websites in a few hours.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    14·
    9 months ago

    If you don’t want to figure out hosting (and I don’t blame you), you can use shared hosts for less than a dollar per month, especially for low-tech websites. If you want to deal with databases, there are guides for any programming language you can think of; PHP is traditionally very easy to get started with and supported on just about any shared host, but Python is also becoming available on cheap shared hosting these days. As for creating databases: if you buy shared hosting, you usually get access to a (barebones) management interface where you can set up databases. You’ll still have to write the SQL to set up the tables and store/retrieve data, but creating the database should be relatively straight-forward.

    Setting up an onion site is not that hard: you run your website on a computer (any computer that’s turned on all day, whether you rent one online or stuff a Raspberry Pi in your basement, or even an old Android phone!), without even bothering to set up things like TLS or getting a domain. The bare basics of an onion site are: 1. generate a key (there are free tools) that becomes your “domain”, 2. install Tor on the computer, 3. put that key in the right folder on your computer and 4. add a single line in the Tor config file to expose your local server. From that moment on, you can deploy your website like you normally do.

    If you want to generate an onion domain that starts with something recognisable, you’ll need to brute-force one; you can’t just register onion names like normal domains. mkp224o works quite fast, but don’t expect to generate readable names longer than six or seven characters unless you have a lot of patience.

    I have no experience with I2P eepsites, but they seem to be even easier to configure than Onion sites.

    For your own privacy and security: watch out that you don’t expose control panels and such on your web server if you hook up Tor to it. LAMP for Windows does this by default, for instance! If you you can access PHPMyAdmin on localhost:8080/phpmyadmin/, and point your Tor/I2P server to localhost:8080, then anyone on Tor/I2P can also access your PHPMyAdmin! Also make sure you know who you’re protecting yourself from; if you’re trying to hide your website from the police, you’ll need a hell of a lot more precautions than if you just want your website to be available on Tor/I2P.

    Learning the basics for all of this will take more than a few hours. However, once you get some experience, setting up a basic website can be done in minutes.

    Links you may find interesting: