TorrentFreak

• Ernesto
• June 16, 2009
• 88
• pizzatorrent
• Print

With millions of page views every month PizzaTorrent was one of the Internet’s larger torrent meta-search engines. Unfortunately for the site’s owner, being in the spotlight also had its downsides. After ongoing DDoS attacks on the site the founder decided to pull the plug and shut the site down for good.

Launched last year, PizzaTorrent was a torrent meta-search engine inspired by the enormous success of YouTorrent. The site allowed its users to search for torrents on more than a dozen torrent indexers in real-time and was one of the few torrent sites not monetized by advertisements or affiliate links to paid ‘high-speed’ downloads.

For the site’s owner PizzaTorrent was mostly a fun project and a way of giving something back to the BitTorrent community. All the money that went into it came directly from the pockets of the site’s founder.

In the first few months after going live the site’s popularity started to grow up to a point where it had more than 3 million page views a month. However, as time went by the fun started to fade as well, and this eventually led to the site’s closure.

“I didn’t receive any legal threats. All the difficulties really come from other kinds of attacks,” the PizzaTorrent founder explained to TorrentFreak. He said that with the growing number of visitors, DDoS and other attacks on the site increased.

“My feeling is that the search engine was very misunderstood. Or perhaps for the many people that liked it, there were just as many people that hated it. And they decided to destroy it,” the founder of the site said.

It is not clear to him where the attacks originated from. “I don’t know if these people are connected with any anti-piracy lobby or copyright industry, or just lone snipers. But in the end the system won,” he told TorrentFreak.

To end all the trouble PizzaTorrent was closed for good earlier today. There is simply no fun in running a project where you constantly have to evade attacks from unknown ‘enemies’. The founder is considering making the code public or giving it to another suitable party, so it’s not unlikely that PizzaTorrent will reappear one way or another.

“Remember, remember the fifth of November,” the PizzaTorrent founder said, fading into one of the dark corners of the Internet.

Launched last year, PizzaTorrent was a torrent meta-search engine inspired by the enormous success of YouTorrent. The site allowed its users to search for torrents on more than a dozen...