Despite continuous pressure from the entertainment industries, The Pirate Bay isn't planning to cease its operations anytime soon. Instead, the crew ordered 10 shiny new servers which just arrived at a datacenter located in a Swedish mountain complex. With the new hardware the site should be more redundant, reducing possible downtime to a minimum.

In the fall of 2003, when The Pirate Bay first appeared online, it was hosted on a Celeron 1.3GHz machine with 256MB RAM. This one machine did all the work, and that included a fully operational tracker.

In the months that followed it became apparent that more power was needed to keep the site running. In 2004 the tracker was separated from the rest, running on the Pentium laptop pictured above, and the database was also moved to a separate machine.

The above was the start of a continuous process of necessary hardware upgrades in order to keep serving the ever growing number of users.

The Pirate Bay team is currently working on the largest hardware upgrade in the site’s history. Ten 2x 5620 Xeon machines have been ordered, eight with 12GB RAM and two with 24GB RAM. In total, The Pirate Bay will be using 17 machines.

The servers just arrived in a mountain cave near Malmö in southern Sweden where the new datacenter is located. The exact location will not be revealed, a lesson The Pirate Bay team learned from the raid back in 2006.

The existing servers have been relocated from Stockholm where they were hosted for the past years. Previously, The Pirate Bay was hosted in Goteborg as well, which means that the site now completes its tour of Sweden’s three largest cities.

The new Pirate Bay servers arrive at the cave

In the coming days the Pirate Bay team will put new hardware online, presumably without any significant downtime. In fact, the hardware upgrade will ensure more redundancy for the site, meaning that future downtime will be reduced to a minimum.

As can be seen below, since 2003 the 1.3GHz 32-bit Celeron processor has been upped to 279GHz worth of 64-bit Xeons, and the 256MB RAM turned into an impressive 204GB RAM. And this is after The Pirate Bay stopped operating a tracker.

Makes you wonder where it will be 5 years from now.

Search

search1: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6

search2: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6

search3: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6

Web

www1: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6

www2: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6

www3: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x160GB Raid1, Debian 6

www4: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6

www5: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, Debian 6

Torrents

varnish-torrents1:P4-3.3GHz CPU, 3300 MHZ, 4GB RAM, 1x 80 SSD X25-M, Debian 6

varnish-torrents2:P4-3.3GHz CPU, 3300 MHZ, 4GB RAM, 1x 80 SSD X25-M, Debian 6

Database

db1: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 24GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, 2×32 GB SSD X25-E Raid0, Debian 6

db2: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 24GB RAM, 2x500GB Raid1, 2×32 GB SSD X25-E Raid0, Debian 6

Misc.

VM1: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 1x500GB, vmware ESXi 4.1

VM2: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 1x500GB, vmware ESXi 4.1

VM3: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 1x500GB, vmware ESXi 4.1

vmware-storage: 2x E5620 CPU, 19200 MHZ, 12GB RAM, 4x500GB Raid6, Debian 6

vcenter: P4-3.3GHz CPU, 3300 MHZ, 4GB RAM, 2x 80GB Raid1, Win64