After more than five months of downtime Demonoid's website is showing signs of life again. Instead of timing out, demonoid.me has started to redirect to a new demonoid.hk domain, displaying a "403 Forbidden" HTTP status after initially showing a "nothing to see here" notice. While Demonoid is not back yet, these recent developments show that there's activity behind the scenes.

After the popular BitTorrent tracker Demonoid suffered a DDoS and hacker attack July last year, the site’s servers in Ukraine were pulled offline.

Local authorities explained that Interpol asked them to take action as part of an investigation into the site’s alleged owners in Mexico.

In the months that followed the Demonoid team remained silent and the site itself showed absolutely no sign of life, simply timing out. Yesterday, however, something changed.

All of a sudden the Demonoid.me domain started to respond again. Initially it displayed a “nothing to see here” notice, and a few hours later it redirected to a new demonoid.hk domain.

The new Hong Kong domain was registered about a month ago and is currently displaying a “403 Forbidden” HTTP status code. The new site appears to be hosted in Hong Kong as well, where we saw the Demonoid tracker return earlier.

The tracker has gone up and down a few times since then and is currently offline.

Demonoid.hk

While there’s absolutely no guarantee that Demonoid will return in the near future the recent developments clearly show that something is going on behind the scenes. The restart of the tracker at a new hosting company, paired with the new domain showing some response, offers hope to those who miss Demonoid dearly.

The last time TorrentFreak heard from the Demonoid admin was September last year. At the time we were told that there is “nothing interesting to report yet.”

“I hope there will be one day, but it might not be soon,” the tech admin added. Perhaps that day is coming closer now?

In many ways the current situation is reminiscent of the downtime Demonoid suffered half a decade ago. During the summer of 2007 the site shut down its servers after receiving legal threats from the CRIA. After being offline for six months the site eventually reappeared in full glory early 2008.

Time will tell whether Demonoid can make a comeback once again.