The Pirate Bay (TPB) once again remains the most popular torrent site of 2020 in terms of traffic as per the latest data published by TorrentFreak. Although last year in 2019, it was ranked 3rd with YTS & 1337x ahead of it. However this year Pirate Bay was again the top torrent site with an Alexa Rank of 160.

The current growth in traffic is due to the fact that it didn’t face downtime this year, unlike the period between 2018 & 2019, when there was a prolonged period of downtime. Our team is also working on improving the website’s technical stack, implementing caching, setting up multiple cloud servers & CDN servers to enable faster loading across the world, and reduce any downtime.

To do away with these downtimes, Pirate Bay moved moved on to a new infrastructure completing revamping the website in April 2020. During the same time, a little later during April 2020, Pirate Bay’s traffic further surged as various countries had implemented lockdown due to COVID-19, and many users had been flocking to torrent sites to download the latest movies & other stuff. This trend is supposed to continue as internet consumption and penetration increases, especially in developing nations where bandwidth has traditionally been low making it difficult to download torrents.

Torrents available on The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay provides access to millions of torrents available on the internet. Initially, Pirate Bay allowed downloading BitTorrent Files directly, which contained necessary metadata to start P2P download.

Since 2012, it has been providing download via magnet links only. The Pirate Bay does not store actual torrent files and only facilitates peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing over BitTorrent Protocol.

It has a vast torrent database that is organized into categories like Audio, Video, Applications, Games, Porn & Other.

Deciding which torrent to download?

With the proliferation of fake torrents, it is all the more important to sort through the search results at The Pirate Bay to finalize which torrent to select. Multiple factors, including but not limited to seed-peer ratio, determine if a torrent is genuine or not. You need to be able to appreciate the difference between seeders and peers. We have some pro tips for you. There are columns displaying the number of seeders and peers for a particular torrent. Seeders are the users who have downloaded the complete file and are sharing it to the current downloaders. Those currently downloading it are called peers.

It is now apparent as to how a healthy seed-peer ratio would contribute towards download speeds. A torrent with a seed-peer ratio of more than 1 is generally considered healthy. Let us try to delve deeper into the subject and understand how a higher number of seeders would mean better download speeds. Suppose a torrent has 100 peers and 200 seeders. Considering download and upload speeds to be constant, there are twice as many people uploading as those downloading. Simple dynamics of demand and supply dictates how this would lead to higher download speeds.

Another factor to quickly determine if a torrent is genuine shall be skimming through the user comments. It is always a good approach to go for a torrent if the other pirates have good things to say about it. Usually, Pirate Bay users would report as and when they face any issues with the files downloaded.

Why is ThePirateBay Down?

The Pirate Bay may not neccessarily be down albeit now being accessible from your end. It could be an ISP blocking access or a partial outage. We strive to maintain 100% uptime but technical glitches and network outages might occur.

To be sure, is is the same for everybody else, you can check the status page on our official website. You can also try accessing us from a VPN or Proxy. At times, the main site would be inaccessible while it is up and running at the Tor version or through an official mirror

ThePirateBay has a repository of millions of indexed torrents which can be searched and filtered. One can simply browse the multiple categories if unsure of what to download or just go out looking for the popular torrents. We also serve as a torrent tracker to monitor the number of seeds and peers and connect the users to each other facilitating peer-to-peer file transfer.

How to Download Torrent from The Pirate Bay?

Downloading torrents from TPB is relatively easy, and as such, it remains the go-to site for torrenting for many. It has a clean User Interface for beginners to understand.

Downloading torrent files require a torrent client to be installed on your system. There are many torrent clients; however, we suggest starting with UTorrent, which is available on Windows, MAC, Android.

Once you have your torrent client installed, you can log on to the website and search for the required torrent. Users can also use advanced search options for searching for a particular type of data.

The download can be started by clicking on the magnet links provided on each page.

How Safe & Legal is The Pirate Bay?

As we have already mentioned, Pirate Bay remains the most popular torrent site, with millions of users using it as a trusted source for streaming and torrent downloads.

Surfing Pirate Bay as a website or torrenting is not illegal; however, downloading or distribution of copyrighted content without its license or permission to do so is illegal in many countries and can result in hefty fines & lawsuits. Users can refer to their countries copyright laws before using Pirate Bay.

Your Internet Service Provider can monitor and take action if you’re caught torrenting illegally. Actions can range from sending warning letters to slowing down your Internet Speed, to lawsuits in rare cases.

To avoid any legal issues, users usually use Virtual Private Networks to hide their internet activity from their ISP.

VPN works by hiding the user’s IP Address, and as such, it is relatively safe to download torrents using a VPN, remaining anonymous, and keeping their internet activity hidden. However, VPN for such activities should be selected, keeping in mind some important factors listed below:

VPN should not store your activity log. It should be based in a country where the legal system can’t be used to retrieve your activity or records. It should be fast enough so that it doesn’t show down your internet or downloads.

Based on the above factors, we would recommend using ExpressVPN or NordVPN, both of them being completely Safe, Reliable & Fast. Countries that have friendly laws that prevent the aforementioned issues are Switzerland, Netherlands, Russia, Moldova and the likes. You should shy away from companies based in the United States as they may be forced to share your information which could reveal the list of torrents you downloaded from pirate bay.

Another popular option of using Pirate Bay anonymously is via TOR (The Onion Router) browser. TOR works by routing the traffic via the tor network enabling anonymous communication. Pirate Bay can be accessed on TOR browser using it’s TOR URL: uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion

How to access Pirate Bay if it’s Blocked?

The Pirate Bay is known to be blocked in several countries. Many ISP’s have also blocked access to TPB on their networks.

However, Pirate Bay can be unblocked as there are many mirror & proxy sites that are available on its network. Users are advised to use official TPB website & mirrors to avoid any malicious software’s which might get installed with fake sites.

Official Pirate Bay Website & Mirrors

The Pirate Bay is also known to change its domain due to various regulatory issues. Pirate Bay changed its domain to tpb.thepiratebay.by during 2014 downtime. It’s now officially available at thepiratebayproxy.co & thepiratebay.by

TPB Mirror sites work as proxy sites by fetching data from the official website and returning the same, circumventing the blockade. Mirror sites can be used if the official site is down or not reachable.

There are developers who have developed web scripts that can be used to setup mirrors and proxies of piratebay easily. These efforts by torrenting enthusiasts and supports of The Pirate Bay ensure that the website continues to be resilient and suffer through minimum downtime. There are hundreds of mirrors available and there are portals dedicated to listing these mirrors to facilitate discovery.

Many individuals who favor free speech & torrenting have also set up their Mirror & Proxy sites. In case you are interested in setting up your TPB proxy, you can check out the installation procedure at Github.