onion service

an onion service is a website reachable only through the tor network at a .onion address, hiding both the server's location and the visitor's ip.

an onion service (formerly called a hidden service) is a website that lives inside the tor network instead of the regular internet. instead of a domain name it has a .onion address, and reaching it never leaves tor - the connection between you and the site is end to end inside the network.

the clever part is that the connection goes both ways blind: you never learn which server or country hosts the site, and the site never learns your ip address. this is done with a dance involving introduction points and a rendezvous point rather than a direct connection, so there is no single wire that can be traced from either end.

that property explains why onion services dominate this scene: markets, forums, news outlets and ransomware leak sites all publish .onion mirrors because a hosting seizure is much harder when the host's location is unknown, and visitors get network-level anonymity by default.

practical notes: onion addresses are self-authenticating, so a correct address means you are talking to the right key - but lookalike addresses with swapped characters are the classic phishing trick, so verify addresses character by character or through several independent listings.

being published on tor says nothing about whether a site is currently online - services go down for maintenance, ddos or operator drama constantly. that is literally why this site runs an automated checker: every address on the list gets probed through our own tor connection around the clock.