Assuming it's true, this quote from the article: A Freedom Hosting account cost a one time fee of $5 or was free with an invite from an existing member. It off

Assuming it's true, this quote from the article: A Freedom Hosting account cost a one time fee of $5 or was free with an invite from an existing member. It offered unlimited space and bandwidth, an onion domain (“xxx.onion”), “Fast Network with 24/7 Uptime,” PHP and MySQL support with unlimited MYSQL databases [...] A one-off payment of $5 per site? I can't see how the hosting company could make any sort of profit whatsoever, and probably not even break-even (although it does depend on how many sites per server, and how much bandwidth the Tor links can actually take) If an established hosting provider decided that they also wanted to offer hidden-service hosting, and it was misused without their ability/requirement to police it, I think it'd be a different matter (although gathering evidence that a particular .onion site was hosted with them would be problematic, certainly). One of the problems here is that as purely hidden services provider (and presumably, some relatively anonymous form of payment, cash-in-the-mail or whatever), there's no practical way for legal authorities to contact them about investigations, or even determine who has jurisdiction.