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The Raid-Proof Hosting Technology Behind 'The Pirate Bay'
HughPickens.com writes Ernesto reports at TorrentFreak that despite its massive presence the Pirate Bay doesn't have a giant server park but operates from the cloud, on virtual machines that can be quickly moved if needed. The site uses 21 "virtual machines" (VMs) hosted at different providers, up four machines from two years ago, in part due to the steady increase in traffic. Eight of the VMs are used for serving the web pages, searches take up another six machines, and the site's database currently runs on two VMs. The remaining five virtual machines are used for load balancing, statistics, the proxy site on port 80, torrent storage and for the controller. In total the VMs use 182 GB of RAM and 94 CPU cores. The total storage capacity is 620 GB. One interesting aspect of The Pirate Bay is that all virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. "Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don't even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent." All traffic goes through the load balancer, which masks what the other VMs are doing. This also means that none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting providers are publicly linked to TPB. For now, the most vulnerable spot appears to be the site's domain. Just last year TPB burnt through five separate domain names due to takedown threats from registrars. But then again, this doesn't appear to be much of a concern for TPB as the operators have dozens of alternative domain names standing by.
So, you're like the last person in the world to understand that TPB holds no content, just pointers to content?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
When you click the search box it often triggers a popup ad. I would imagine that ad sees hundreds of millions of impressions per month, which would translate to hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly revenue at an average of $1 per 1000 impressions.
There are also some regular ads on the site. They could easily be making more than $10 million a year in ad revenue.
The "keys to the kingdom" point to virtual machines that can be rehosted faster than the raider can work the legal system in multiple countries to get to the next level of servers after raiding the load balancer. The point is not that they can prevent raids but that any raids will be ineffective at shutting them down for more than a few minutes. That effectively discourages raids as a strategy as they are expensive and ineffective.
Studies have consistently shown that people who pirate things like movies, albums, etc are also far more likely to purchase them as well. So, the people advertising on TPB are the ones smart enough to ignore the RIAA's and MPAA's misled war against their best customers.
Also, you can answer your own question for yourself by simply going to TPB and seeing what kind of ads they have.
So, you're like the last person in the world to understand that TPB holds no content, just pointers to content?
With TPB mainly running on magnet links, it's not even that it's a hash of pointers to content these days. Even the actual pointers have gone off-site, which reduces the bandwidth by 99%. My guess is TPB actually serves up more ads than content, if you count bytes.
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