TorrentFreak

While the major record labels and movie studios do what they can to shutter The Pirate Bay, thousands of lesser known artists are eager to become featured on the site’s homepage. Since the start of the “Promo Bay” initiative in January, 10,000 independent artists have signed up to be promoted by the world’s largest torrent site. Those who were lucky enough to be featured have enjoyed a healthy career boost and in some cases earned thousands of dollars from file-sharing fans..

After its move to the cloud earlier this week The Pirate Bay became more portable and raid-proof than ever before. The entire website and six months of database and code backups have a storage footprint of just 500 gigabytes. At the same time, The Pirate Bay claims to be the greenest site in the list of 100 most visited websites on the Internet. In its new setup the site uses just 2.5 kilowatts to serve mllions of users a day, which is equivalent to the consumption of a regular vacuum cleaner.

The Pirate Bay has made an important change to its infrastructure. The world’s most famous BitTorrent site has switched its entire operation to the cloud. From now on The Pirate Bay will serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. The move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids — all while keeping user data secure.

Less than a month ago The Pirate Bay celebrated its 9th anniversary, but today the infamous BitTorrent site is already looking forward to the next celebration. The Pirate Bay is planning a massive party in Stockholm next year when it turns 10 years old, and thousands of people have already indicated that they will be [...]

Like many other websites on the Internet The Pirate Bay makes its money from ads. Due to its reputation the torrent site generally has to settle for lower grade banners, but the Canadian Government recently broke this trend. This week ads from the Canadian Department of Finance’s Economic Action Plan appeared on The Pirate Bay. Unfortunately for the infamous torrent site, the feds pulled the banner campaign as soon as they were alerted to it.

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.

In 2003 three computer addicts came up with the idea of starting a new file-sharing site using the then relatively new BitTorrent protocol. One of the original founders of the site is Gottfrid Svartholm, who was arrested on Cambodia earlier this month for an alleged hack of the Swedish company Logica. After more than a [...]