Mininova.org Servers and Traffic: 2006 vs 2007

Written by Ernesto on October 04, 2007 

Mininova.org has experienced some massive growth over the past year. The number of visitors went up from less than a million per day to 3 million, and to keep everything running smoothly the server park nearly tripled from 7 to 19 servers.

Mininova.org Servers and Traffic: 2006 vs 2007Mininova is without a doubt the most popular BitTorrent site in terms of traffic. According to Alexa they are among the 100 most visited sites on the Internet, more popular than Digg.com, Apple.com and TorrentFreak.com for example.

In September Mininova received over 70.000.000 visitors that generated more than 300.000.000 pageviews, and they’re still growing. In October the number of daily visitors gets close to 3 million a day which means that they can get close to 100 million visitors this month.

And there are some changes if we compare 2006 and 2007

  • visitors per day: 980.000 vs 2.800.000
  • pageviews per day: 4.250.000 vs 13.750.000
  • searches per day: 500.000 vs 3.250.000
  • downloads per day: 110.000 vs 280.000
  • torrents in database: 150.000 vs 500.000
  • Many people might wonder what is needed to keep a site like this running, so did we, and we asked the Mininova team for an update. Last time we did a post about Mininova’s server setup they had 7 servers in total, but times have changed. As you can see in the picture below (click to enlarge), Mininova is now running on an impressive 19 servers.

    mininova 2006mininova 2007

    More info about the servers can be found over here; they really like Opteron. I’m really curious how many servers they will need a year from now. We’ll keep you updated.

    Niek, thanks for your amazing Visio skills.

    Previously: Demonoid Aftermath: An Open Letter to the CRIA

    Next: BitTorrent Addiction: The Thrill of the Chase

    41 Responses

    1 Oct 04, 2007 at 22:32 by CaptainHack

    Mininova quickly became one of my favorite torrent engines this year. Their music selection and movie selection is outstanding from my perspective. I really enjoy the fact they carry a number of classic 80’s and hard to find flicks.

    2 Oct 04, 2007 at 22:46 by TidusBlade

    Mininova is the best public tracker ^_^ Hope it stays online forever :D

    3 Oct 04, 2007 at 23:03 by bt

    its not a public tracker, its a moderated index

    4 Oct 05, 2007 at 00:14 by Anonymous

    You guys really need to stop writing features on torrent sites. The MAFIAA are probably using this blog as a goddamn resource by now.

    5 Oct 05, 2007 at 00:44 by Anonymous

    Although mininova is one of my favorites, its somewhat disappointing (I do understand that they need make their money) to see that five of it’s 19 servers is devoted to ads.

    6 Oct 05, 2007 at 01:21 by Julius B Thyssen

    Don’t be a fool @4, have you read any of the MediaDefender mail? If not, please do. mininova is mentioned a lot.
    Which is logical: Do you really think ANYONE working in IT does not know about mininova’s status and fame? Think again!

    7 Oct 05, 2007 at 03:33 by dtstuff9

    i stopped using mininova after my virus scanner (kaspersky) detected a trojan when i just went to the site without doing anything.

    8 Oct 05, 2007 at 04:18 by ev

    I love how the internet in the pictures are tubes!

    9 Oct 05, 2007 at 04:36 by www.dn.se

    well, me just come by fe post a likkle comment - deah, yes, me know seh mini nova deh a yarh - BUT ME HEAR SEH ITTA LIKKLE BIZNESS, GWANN HOLA PON A WELL JOKSTAH TORRENT SITTAUATION.

    (and we stop there)

    BONUS –>

    CYAAN (famous word in like 1983)
    RIBBIT (MUSICAL WORD FROM 1982 (TOAST)
    Duppy (Ghost, R.I.P)

    like -> CYAAN SEH MEH NEVAH DID AH WARN YAH.

    10 Oct 05, 2007 at 07:59 by Z

    It’s a series of tubes!

    11 Oct 05, 2007 at 08:38 by therocket

    @dtstuff9 - You didn’t get the virus from Mininova.

    They have always had the .org domain but recently got a hold of the .com domain. Did you visit .com not .org? Mininova is 100% safe and the most professional torrent site out there.

    12 Oct 05, 2007 at 08:39 by itsfunny

    [quote comment="180944"]i stopped using mininova after my virus scanner (kaspersky) detected a trojan when i just went to the site without doing anything.[/quote]
    lol…just lol… :x
    My advice is get new firewall/av ^_^

    13 Oct 05, 2007 at 09:55 by Erik

    [quote comment="180849"]Although mininova is one of my favorites, its somewhat disappointing (I do understand that they need make their money) to see that five of it’s 19 servers is devoted to ads.[/quote]
    That’s because they are used to run other projects like snotr.com as well.

    14 Oct 05, 2007 at 15:21 by Tom

    Lol “amazing Visio skills” seriously?

    15 Oct 05, 2007 at 15:35 by anon

    Excellent post.

    Does anyone know where you can find similar information for other popular BitTorrent trackers (e.g. TPB, isoHunt, ect.) I recall reading about the setup of TPB somewhere on one of my seemingly endless web crawling adventures (4 a.m. curiousity), however I forgot to bookmark the page.

    16 Oct 05, 2007 at 16:14 by Anonymous

    http://static.thepiratebay.org/

    17 Oct 05, 2007 at 17:05 by Ben Jones

    [quote comment="180838"]You guys really need to stop writing features on torrent sites. The MAFIAA are probably using this blog as a goddamn resource by now.[/quote]

    Annonymous - as a former copyright enforcer (albeit 10 years ago) I have some experiance with this stuff. I only have one thing to say - nothing you see here is unknown to copyright enforcement/antiP2P groups. It is their job to know about all of this. When you pay people to research, scour, check on all of this stuff 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, they’re going to find out everything.

    There are no big secrets, comments like ‘remember the first rule of newsgroups’ show how little understanding of what is actually happening people have. Basically, if you know about a site, they know about it.

    18 Oct 05, 2007 at 19:52 by M

    [quote comment="180849"]Although mininova is one of my favorites, its somewhat disappointing (I do understand that they need make their money) to see that five of it’s 19 servers is devoted to ads.[/quote]

    Well, I’m doing my part to easy the load of those servers ;-)

    19 Oct 05, 2007 at 20:07 by Jug

    [quote comment="180838"]You guys really need to stop writing features on torrent sites. The MAFIAA are probably using this blog as a goddamn resource by now.[/quote]
    Well, these guys are clearly already aware of both this site and the “big” torrent sites it covers. They may be stupid in one way, but not certainly not stupid in the other.

    20 Oct 05, 2007 at 21:40 by Didact

    So how much money do you think those 100 million visitors are bringing in each month?

    21 Oct 05, 2007 at 23:29 by bayme

    Well, according to my measurements, which serves a similar audience;

    75000 pageviews a month only assures you with about 100 euro, because your visitors are the smart anti-advertising crowd, rarely see or look at ads, let alone click on them).
    So, extrapolating that to their 100 million “visitors”, guessing they count hits instead of actual page-loads, I’m roughly estimating they make about €20000,- a month, clean, after taxes.

    If you look at prices for leaseweb, you can partly guess what the expenses are, but they won’t be more than half of that (including ALL hardware bills), so they’ll have 10000 euros to share among themselves EACH month!

    Of course, they’ll try everything to deny this. Just like TPB did before.

    22 Oct 06, 2007 at 01:36 by torrent-tatty

    Mininova is realy Great.

    We get many good Downloaders from them.

    No sex Adversments. That brings success

    Sorry fo the bad english.

    23 Oct 06, 2007 at 04:36 by Scott

    Mininova isn’t hosted on LeaseWeb.

    $ host http://www.mininova.org
    http://www.mininova.org is an alias for mininova.org.
    mininova.org has address 87.233.147.140
    http://www.mininova.org is an alias for mininova.org.
    http://www.mininova.org is an alias for mininova.org.
    mininova.org mail is handled by 10 mininova.org.
    mininova.org mail is handled by 10 mininova.org.db.
    $ whois 87.233.147.140

    … some stuff snipped …

    % Information related to ‘87.233.147.128 - 87.233.147.191′

    inetnum: 87.233.147.128 - 87.233.147.191
    netname: NL-TRUESERVER-XS-NETWORKS-6
    descr: Range assigned to XS Networks BV
    country: NL
    admin-c: TSAR1-RIPE
    tech-c: Ara42-RIPE
    status: ASSIGNED PA
    mnt-by: TRUESERVER-MNT
    source: RIPE # Filtered

    role: Administrative role account
    address: Trueserver B.V.
    address: Cooperatiehof 16A
    address: 1073 JR Amsterdam
    phone: +31 20 3059750
    fax-no: +31 20 3059751
    admin-c: TSSJ1-RIPE
    tech-c: TSTR1-RIPE
    nic-hdl: TSAR1-RIPE
    mnt-by: TRUESERVER-MNT
    source: RIPE # Filtered

    role: Administrative role account
    address: MiniNova BV
    address: Wethouder Teselinglaan 10 A
    address: 3972GB Driebergen-Rijsenburg
    address: The Netherlands
    phone: +31 877 843530
    fax-no: +31 877 843530
    abuse-mailbox: abuse@mininova.org
    admin-c: TSAR1-RIPE
    tech-c: TSTR1-RIPE
    nic-hdl: Ara42-RIPE
    mnt-by: TRUESERVER-MNT
    source: RIPE # Filtered

    It’s interesting how many trackers ARE hosted on LeaseWeb, though. I counted almost 50, including (until the move a few days ago) all of The Pirate Bay’s.

    24 Oct 06, 2007 at 05:12 by ~

    [quote]It’s interesting how many trackers ARE hosted on LeaseWeb, though. I counted almost 50, including (until the move a few days ago) all of The Pirate Bay’s.[/quote]

    TPB was hosted by leaseweb? I don’t think so. I thought they’ve always been with PRQ in Sweden.

    25 Oct 06, 2007 at 06:18 by Scott

    http://www.thepiratebay.org apparently was and is hosted with PRQ, but a few days ago, tpb/open/vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org all resolved to 85.17.40.xx, part of a block owned by NFOrce, under LeaseWeb.

    I hope I’m not helping any antipiracy companies with this information, but I suspect not as anyone can read whois information! (It’s probably more important that we, the good guys, know what’s going on.) The concentration at LeaseWeb unsettles me a little, but it’s mainly low-key private sites and I guess anyone can move.

    26 Oct 06, 2007 at 13:49 by JayS

    Wow. Impressive…

    What about hosting in Denmark? Do they govern strict Copyright laws??

    27 Oct 07, 2007 at 09:44 by Ivana

    Mininova is the best! I download almost everything from there :)

    28 Oct 07, 2007 at 12:14 by zerk00

    ” With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility ” … Ben Parker

    lets all hope they use their power well

    And the haters are always going to go after the top dog.

    Gud luck Mininova ur going to need it.

    ….. >:P ….

    ” Sorry OJ Johnny’s dead” … o_O

    29 Dec 07, 2007 at 20:13 by daniel

    cantarstrike

    30 Jan 07, 2008 at 23:52 by killer

    Mininova is awesome they are the best at removing fake torrents out of any site i have been to

    31 Jan 14, 2008 at 15:28 by Anonymous

    [quote comment="181513"]Well, according to my measurements, which serves a similar audience;

    75000 pageviews a month only assures you with about 100 euro, because your visitors are the smart anti-advertising crowd, rarely see or look at ads, let alone click on them).
    So, extrapolating that to their 100 million “visitors”, guessing they count hits instead of actual page-loads, I’m roughly estimating they make about €20000,- a month, clean, after taxes.

    If you look at prices for leaseweb, you can partly guess what the expenses are, but they won’t be more than half of that (including ALL hardware bills), so they’ll have 10000 euros to share among themselves EACH month!

    Of course, they’ll try everything to deny this. Just like TPB did before.[/quote]
    So what? They do a great job feeding us with torrents. I don’t care how much they make every month or day, all I want is free entertainment and Mininova make it possible.

    32 Jan 19, 2008 at 00:42 by kerkuk

    hallao

    33 Jan 19, 2008 at 00:43 by kerkuk

    32

    34 Jan 19, 2008 at 00:44 by kerkuk

    [quote comment="266798"]32[/quote]

    35 May 04, 2008 at 03:36 by filme bune

    [quote comment="180966"]I love how the internet in the pictures are tubes![/quote]

    36 May 19, 2008 at 14:43 by hnky

    I think Mininova is down soon :-(

    They will be sued within days.

    37 Jun 20, 2008 at 21:24 by blogger dan

    So how are is it to use torrents ?
    I run http://www.buyblogreviews.com and want to start a torrent site :)

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