The Pirate Bay has been back online for more than two weeks but thus far it's been rough sailing. The notorious torrent site has had to jump from hosting service to hosting service just to stay online and is still looking for a safe haven. At the same time, scammers keep hounding the site with fake files and malicious links.

Two weeks ago The Pirate Bay returned online and millions of users have been finding their way back to the popular torrent site since.

While the site is currently up and running, Pirate Bay’s comeback hasn’t been without trouble. On Friday the site went offline for roughly 12 hours after a hosting provider pulled the plug.

TF reached out to Pirate Bay admin Winston, who informed us that “getting stable hosting” is one of the main challenges the site faces at the moment.

TPB is currently using CloudFlare’s CDN services which means that the hosting location is well hidden. However, Cloudflare does forward takedown notices to hosting providers and most are not very eager to have TPB as a customer.

The site continues to look for a safe alternative but that is proving to be a troublesome process. When we discussed the topic with the site’s admin TPB went offline again, causing yet more downtime.

“Another ISP killed it,” Winston told us yesterday. “So yeah. It will take a long time until it’s stable.”

While the hosting issue has priority, there’s also a spam problem TPB has to deal with. Despite deploying “FakeSkan” robots there are still many scammy comments and malicious torrents on the site.

The Pirate Bay initially launched without moderators due to security concerns. This resulted in a mutiny among TPB staff, some of whom wanted to start their own version of the site.

While the locked-out staffers managed to revive a copy of the Suprbay forum a few days ago, launching a TPB alternative will prove to be much harder. Winston now says that TPB is open to welcoming some of the old staffers back in the near future.

“After hosting issues are resolved I’ll talk to some old mods,” Winston tells us. “If they want to continue then it’s okay, but I won’t look for new mods. Someone from the old team will have to be in charge of that.”

After the initial disappointment of being locked out, several admins are indeed showing willingness to return to their former home.

“The conditions do not need to change from our side,” long time TPB moderator Agricola told TF. “All we want to do is keep the site clean.”

In addition to dealing with the pollution problem, TPB registrations should also open up again in the future. At the moment new users are unable to sign-up and publish content.

“There are just some security issues that have to be resolved first,” Winston says. “Plus, the hosting has to be stable.”

Speaking of hosting, a few hours before this article was published The Pirate Bay was forced to leave another ISP. That brings the total to four thus far, and the end is not yet in sight.