With several million daily visitors The Pirate Bay is one of the 100 most-visited websites on the Internet. Despite its massive presence the website does not have a giant server park. Instead, it operates from the cloud, on 21 virtual machines that can be quickly moved if needed.

Two years ago The Pirate Bay made an important change to its infrastructure by switching its entire operation to the cloud.

Instead of buying their own hardware The Pirate Bay decided to serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. This saved costs, guaranteed better uptime, and made the site more portable and thus harder to take down.

The operational change also had a downside. Before the move the notorious torrent site had a dedicated page displaying its hardware and server setup, which was something true geeks kept a close eye on.

Today the site no longer owns any crucial pieces of hardware. However, it’s worth taking a look at the virtual setup the site is running on now. TorrentFreak asked the Pirate Bay team for an update and they were happy to oblige.

At the time of writing the site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers. This is up four machines from two years ago, in part due to the steady increase in traffic.

Most of the VMs, eight in total, are used for serving the web pages. The 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, but that’s not all used. Needless to say, that is relatively modest considering the size of the site.

– 8 web

– 6 search

– 2 database

– 1 lvs

– 1 stats

– 1 for proxy site on .80,

– 1 torrents

– 1 control

All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. 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.

According to the Pirate Bay team the current setup works pretty well. Although small issues pop up every now and then, the site has had no major downtime recently.

If the police come knocking in the future the cloud servers can of course be disconnected. However, with the site’s current setup it would be fairly easy to continue operating from another provider in a relatively short time.

For now, the most vulnerable spot appears to be the site’s domain. Just last year the site 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.