How to create an onion service from the portal

How to create an onion service from the portal

One page creates a service: an onion address, a hosting plan and the software stack it starts with. Everything is billed monthly from your account credit, and the address is generated for you unless you ask for a prefix.

Step 1 — Open the Create page

In the Customer Portal, click "Create Onion Service" in the sidebar. The page has three cards — the vanity prefix, the server performance, and the hosting software — plus the button that submits all of it.

Step 2 — Optional: a vanity prefix

The prefix is the beginning of the address. Leave it empty and you get a random one immediately; type up to four characters (a-z and 2-7) and the address will start with them, but the host has to search for a matching key, so a longer prefix takes much longer to appear. The rest of the address is always random.

Step 3 — Choose the plan

Server Performance lists the three plans with what each one gets: CPU share, RAM, device I/O, web server request workers and the MySQL connection limit. Starter is enough for a small site, Premium doubles the resources, Performance is for high traffic. The monthly price is printed on each card and is charged from your credit.

Step 4 — Choose the software

Hosting Software decides what is installed before your first visit: a plain PHP site with an optional framework (Laravel, Symfony, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Yii, Drogon), or WordPress, together with the PHP version to run — 7.4, 8.2 or 8.3. You can change the PHP version later from the PHP Version tab, so pick what your code needs today.

Step 5 — Create it

Press Create New Onion Service. The portal returns to the service list with a green message: "Your onion service is deploying. You may try to refresh the page to see the latest status." The new row shows a red indicator and the address is already reserved.

Deployment takes a minute or two. Refresh the page: the indicator turns green and the row becomes a link to the service.

Step 6 — First look at the dashboard

Open the service. The header shows the address, the stack, the PHP and MySQL versions and the plan; the resource cards and graphs fill in once the host has collected the first samples, so a brand-new service legitimately shows "Data is not available" for a few minutes.

From here the usual next steps are: upload your files over SFTP or the File Manager, import a database on the Database tab, and enable SSL/TLS if you need HTTPS. All of them are described in the other articles of this knowledgebase.

Related articles

• How to create an onion address alias for your onion service
• How to upgrade your onion service plan