After its move to the cloud earlier this week The Pirate Bay became more portable and raid-proof than ever before. The entire website and six months of database and code backups have a storage footprint of just 500 gigabytes. At the same time, The Pirate Bay claims to be the greenest site in the list of 100 most visited websites on the Internet. In its new setup the site uses just 2.5 kilowatts to serve mllions of users a day, which is equivalent to the consumption of a regular vacuum cleaner.

This week The Pirate Bay made an important change to its infrastructure by switching their entire operation to the cloud.

From now on The Pirate Bay will serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. This saves costs, guarantees better uptime, and makes the site more portable and thus harder to take down.

“We like to optimize,” The Pirate Bay tells TorrentFreak.

“For example, low power consumption, low ram usage, low storage requirements. This is also good when it comes to hiding backups around the net, as there’s no need for a big pipe or disk to keep a daily copy,” they add.

In its new setup The Pirate Bay, including six months of database and code backups, takes up just 500 gigabytes. But, the amount of power that’s needed to keep the operation running is perhaps even more impressive.

“We would estimate the entire power-draw of the 17 virtual machines, switches, router as well as all the cloud stuff and cooling to be in the 2,500 Watts range,” The Pirate Bay tells TorrentFreak.

Previously, The Pirate Bay used more than double the amount of power, roughly 6,000 Watts, to keep its 16 dedicated servers and 3 switches up and running.

“We now use the equivalent of a large vacuum cleaner, which means we are probably the greenest Alexa top 100 site,” TPB says.

Indeed, looking at Pirate Bay’s competitors in the list of 100 most visited sites on the Internet, it would be no surprise if the infamous BitTorrent site consumes the least power of the bunch.

The Pirate Bay does especially well compared to central file-hosting websites.

The now defunct Megaupload, for example, used 1,103 servers full of disks at Carpathia’s hosting facility and 690 more at Leaseweb. Cooling included, this could quickly add up to a 2 megawatts power-draw.

This is more than 800 times the amount of power The Pirate Bay uses at the moment. Perhaps they should consider a name change to The Green Bay?