Despite years of persecution, the world’s most notorious pirated content exchange continues to flout copyright laws worldwide. The Pirate Bay team revealed how cloud technology made their service’s virtual servers truly invulnerable.

Two founders of The Pirate Bay (TPB) file exchange are in prison, but their creation continues to receive millions of unique visitors daily and remains among the 100 most popular websites worldwide.

Today The Pirate Bay has 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) scattered around the globe with cloud-hosting providers, and the new setup works just fine, reported TorrentFreak, having anonymously questioned the Pirate Bay team. The cloud technology made the site more portable, eliminated the need for any crucial pieces of hardware and therefore made the torrent harder to take down. Costs have decreased and better uptime is now guaranteed.

True geeks cannot follow up hardware and server setup anymore, but the advantages of the new tech set-up for the notorious torrent site outweigh any inconveniences.

After operating ‘in exile’ in Guyana and Peru without much luck, two years ago The Pirate Bay team made a landmark decision and decided to move away from operating physical servers and switched all of their operations to the cloud.

Two years ago there were just four VMs, but the increased traffic has heralded a five-fold growth of virtual machines.

Out of 21 VMs, eight are busy serving web pages. Six machines are processing the searches, while TPB’s database is being run on two VMs. The remaining five VMs are needed for load balancing, statistics, torrent storage, the proxy site on port 80 and controller functions.

The system operates using 182 GB of RAM and 94 GPU cores, with total storage capacity of 620 GB, which are not used in full, actually. Considering the scale of The Pirate Bay website, these characteristics are quite modest.

One of the secrets of the modern day TPB is that the commercial cloud providers hosting the torrent site have no idea that the PTB is among their clients. The load balancer VM that funnels all the traffic to other TPB virtual servers masks their activities, which means none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting providers are publicly linked to TPB. This makes the new TPB virtually ‘raid-proof’ and very hard for police to track it down. There are no more physical servers to be seized, too, as happened in 2006, when Swedish police raided TPB’s hosting company, seizing everything from servers to fax machines and blank CDs.

Despite occasional difficulties that hit the service from time to time, there have been no major breakdowns recently and no agency has attempted to shut the torrent site down.

It is true that cloud servers can be disconnected like any physical server, but even in that case restoration of the operation is much easier than before and services can be restored from a different provider relatively quickly.

Still, The Pirate Bay remains The Pirate Bay, and this name is widely known among registrars as the root of evil, burning through five separate domain names the last year alone. But that doesn’t dampen the spirits of the TPB team, as operators have dozens of alternative domain names waiting in the wings.

Two of TPB’s original founders, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde, are currently serving terms in prison and TPB has posted a banner asking visitors to send their support to the site’s founders.

“Show your support by sending them some encouraging mail! Gottfrid is only allowed to receive letters, while Peter gladly receives books, letters and vegan candy.”

When Svartholm and Sunde are out of jail, they’ll find that the rules of the pirate game have changed – and most probably in their favor.