The best bet would be to limit new customer registration but not to limit new vendor registration. Perhaps charge a small fee for customer registration for a while and turn off unlimited free registration. That makes more sense to me than turning off new vendor registration, and it doesn't have decreased security as a result. Plus then you can make some more bitcoins DPR . It is true that the size of SR has hurt the anonymity of the clients connecting to it a bit. This is because its introduction points are being DDOSed by its clients. After they go down the hidden service eventually changes to new introduction points. Then clients can access the site for a bit again , until the new introduction points go down. When they go down clients cycle through a huge list of circuits that all fail in an attempt to build a circuit to an introduction point. This causes clients to build a lot more circuits than they would if introduction points didn't go down so frequently. This is also why it appears down for some people while it is up for others, people who have already established a connection to the hidden service prior to its introduction nodes going down remain connected but clients trying to establish a connection cannot. At least this was the theory on why very popular hidden services were having connectivity issues, I think this specific issue was fixed in a version of Tor a few releases back, so if you have not updated Tor recently that would be the first step. There are probably other issues as well and perhaps now you are running into another problem, but keeping Tor up to date is important to keep it so your hidden service can scale to larger numbers of clients. I don't access the SR market so I have no idea what the connectivity issues look like. Can some people connect while others cannot? That would indicate you are still running into the problem I just described. Or is it down for everyone simultaneously? Perhaps its entry guards recently rotated and it got three low bandwidth ones that cannot handle the number of people who surf SR. The bandwidth of a hidden services entry guards is one of the bottlenecks for how much traffic the hidden service can handle at a given time. Forcing early rotation could solve that, but rotating entry guards speeds up deanonymization of hidden services. You could even manually select some high bandwidth entry guards, but it also isn't really a good idea to override the entry guard selection algorithm of Tor.