The Pirate Bay turns nine years old today, a truly remarkable achievement considering the history of the site. What started out in 2003 as a fun project of a small group of friends turned into one of the largest websites on the Internet. The site has become a global icon; hated by Hollywood and other entertainment industries, but loved by millions of file-sharers.

15 September 2003 The Pirate Bay was founded by Swedish pro-culture organization Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy).

Since there was no filesharing network in Sweden at the time, Piratbyrån decided to launch one, using the relatively new BitTorrent protocol.

Peter Sunde (Brokep), one of the co-founders together with Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) and Gottfrid Svartholm (Anakata), later said that their initial goal was to build a Scandinavian BitTorrent community.

“At the time there was one big torrent site, which was called Suprnova, but they mainly had international content. We and Piratbyrån wanted more Swedish and Scandinavian content. So we started a big library, and that is The Pirate Bay.”

The technical setup was rather primitive in the beginning, to say the least.

The site first came online in Mexico where Anakata hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time.

After a few months it moved to Sweden where it was hosted on TiAMO’s laptop, a Celeron 1.3GHz machine with 256MB RAM.

This one machine did all the work and included a fully operational tracker.

The Pirate Bay server

It didn’t take long before more server power was needed to keep the site and tracker from collapsing due to a growing number of visitors.

By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was tracking a million peers and over 60,000 torrent files. Around the same time the founders also noticed that it was not only Scandinavians developing interested in their site.

In fact, by now 80% of their users came from other parts of the world. Because of increasing worldwide popularity The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages in July 2005.

The Pirate Bay before the redesign

Due to these changes, The Pirate Bay grew even faster, and the number of peers tracked by the site grew to 2,500,000 by the end of 2005.

Pirate Bay’s increase in traffic didn’t go unnoticed in Hollywood either. Copyright holders started to send out takedown notices, which were often mocked by the site’s founders. Eventually, however, The Pirate Bay got raided following pressure from Hollywood and the USA.

May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The officers were tasked with shutting down the Pirate Bay’s servers.