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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.
I mean, 620 GB of storage isn't much, but I'm sure some people would want to RAID it anyway. Although I've heard that Police RAID only works with write-only storage...
Ezekiel 23:20
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
Raids only make sites become raid-proof. Just as monitoring creates encryption and oppression creates rebellion.
But of course one cannot fight the core problem when the core problem is oneself.
Both. You can make money and have the lulz...
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.
Some people out there have motivations other than "money" and "lulz".
Things like "respect of one's peers", "ideology", "non-conformism" or even "the challenge of doing something hard no one else can do", can make some people take quite large risks.
That's perhaps part of it, but the main reason is that TPB is still the best place to get new stuff. I always download all new TV-series there, except netflix-series that I can get on... netflix.
As for games, I recently wanted to buy a few games on stream, but they demanded a copy of my id because my card was issued in another country than the one I live in at the moment. Fine, goodbye. Downloaded the games at TPB instead.
It should not only be possible but also convenient to buy media. Netflix and GOG are great and get my money, other places that are less great and makes it difficult can keep their digital copies while I go browsing at the Pirate Bay.
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.
went legit half a decade ago?
According to many people, they have always been just as legit as Google or Bing.
They just provide more accurate search results for certain types of searches.
Yes, there are independant film makers out there, but without those box-office sales, we wouldn't have Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, or a slew of the other CGI-dependant movies with big-name actors/actresses.
Oh, the horror!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Yup. I recently bought a game on a steam sale. For as little as I paid for it, the hassle of pirating it would not have been worth it.
On the other hand, apparently many parts of the game aren't actually working now due to a bad update. Of course, the advantage of Steam is that I'll probably get that update automatically within a few days. On the other hand, if I had obtained it from TPB I probably would be playing it now instead of waiting, since the pirated version would be an older known-good one (though obviously missing whatever was in that update).
I also saw a "# activations remaining" message when registering my CD key with the game, which wasn't terribly comforting. I suspect that Valve would take care of any actual issues down the road, but who knows, maybe in 10 years I'll end up stopping by TPB to get a crack for the game that I just bought.
Stuff like this is why there is piracy.
If you watched the documentary (TPB: AFK) you'd know why. Most of them are pro-freedom. Their network engineer does it "for the challenge".
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings