The AMA is a joke. You just need tor installed, and the application running on some port (preferable only accessible to localhost). You then configure your tor to associate that internal port with some onion address (for which you have the private key). That's it.
It's actually really handy for giving a computer a public address behind a router without doing a port forward, even for non onion web things (like chat applications), even if you don't care about anonymity. Anonymity is just a bonus at that point.
Now if you want to make a website, there is more to consider. You are going to want to build it so it never dials out over anything but tor. For example a title fetch or thumbnail fetch. If doing it on a VPS you are going to want to store the application on LUKS or they can just read the hosts drives and see, 'hey, that kind of looks like the code for that one site,' or see files they uploaded to it.
(post is archived)