Tor Onion Service

[maltfield]

Feature request

Description

This issue is a feature request to make ivpn.net accessible over a Tor Onion Service

Describe the solution you'd like

I'd like, as a new customer, to be able to create an account, pay for time, download configs, and contact support over a Tor Onion Service in Tor Browser -- without ever having to make requests through the clearnet

Why?

Fun fact: the most popular website on the darknet is facebook. There are hundreds of other popular sites on the darknet, including debian, the CIA, the NYT, the BBC, ProPublica, Mullvad, AirVPN, Cryptostorm, and michaelaltfield.net.

All of these organizations chose to make their websites available over .onion addresses so their website will be accessible from millions of daily tor users without leaving the darknet. Besides the obvious privacy benefits for journalists, activists, cancer patients, etc --- Tor has a fundamentally different approach to encryption (read: it's more secure).

Instead of using the untrustworthy X.509 PKI model, all connections to a v3 .onion address is made to a single pinned certificate that is directly correlated to the domain itself (the domain is just a hash of the public key + some metadata).

Moreover, some of the most secure operating systems send all the user's Internet traffic through the Tor network --- for the ultimate data security & privacy of its users.

In short, your users are much safer communicating to your site using a .onion domain than its clearnet domain.

Note: the above snippet was copied from my article about how to setup an Onion Service in Wordpress.

The article is licensed CC BY-SA, and you're welcome to re-use any of its text for commercial purposes, so long as you provide prominent attribution and license your article with a compatible copyleft license

Marketing Opportunity

It's a bit of a red flag to new customers that ivpn doesn't (yet) have an Onion Service.

Context: Mullvad is killing OpenVPN support in January, which is probably going to cause an exodus of users looking for an alternative in 2025 Q4 and 2026 Q1.

I highly recommend:

1. Make your website accessible behind an Onion Service before January. Write a content marketing article about this new feature to protect your customers, and share it on all the socials

2. Write an article about how IVPN can be connected-to via standard openvpn clients. Publish this in January 2025, and shrae it on all socials. Make a note in this article, linking to the article about your new Onion Service [1], and you're sure to get a lot of conversions (from new mullvad refugees)

[johnnyburnaway]

Thanks @maltfield - of course we are aware of this option, and we have planned it and started work on it two years ago, but we hit some blockers during that process and deprioritised it. Frankly, the number of requests to provide an Onion Service has been very low (which was surprising), that's one reason we have not bumped it higher on our list again. I don't personally agree with the red flag characterisation, but I understand each prospective user has their own evaluation criteria.

We don't have the bandwidth to work on this in the next 3 months as we are finishing up on multiple major long-term projects, but will keep it in mind for Q1 2026.

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open 60 days with no activity.