The popular BitTorrent site Mininova celebrates its 3rd anniversary today. At the time it launched, no one would have predicted that it would become the success story it turned out to be, but we can now safely say that Mininova is here to stay.

There was quite a bit of news surrounding Mininova in the last year, they regained the .com domain, served billions of torrents, and launched a content distribution platform for independent publishers. Most impressive perhaps is that they are now among the 50 most visited websites on the Internet, which makes them the most frequently visited BitTorrent site.

The first public version of Mininova went public on January 15, 2005 and was hosted at the DSL line of Niek, one of the founders of the site. The name “Mininova” was inspired by SuprNova.org, the popular BitTorrent site that decided to shut its doors in December 2004, a few days before Mininova was launched. Not surprisingly, within a few days Niek’s connection couldn’t handle the bandwidth.

Gottfrid of The PirateBay was so kind to offer them a hosting account until they found a more permanent solution. After a while Mininova temporarily moved to Gary of IsoHunt, but soon after that they got their own servers. Since that time, Mininova continued to extend and upgrade their server park, which consists of 27 servers at the moment.

What are Mininova’s plans for the future, you might wonder. We talked to Niek from Mininova and he told TorrentFreak: “We want to focus on getting more publishers for our recently launched Content Distribution service. Currently we have over 200 publishers and we’re sure this this number will grow tremendously the coming months”

There is no doubt that Mininova will continue to grow throughout 2008, we wish them all the best with their future endeavors.