File-Sharing Site Pirate Bay Seizes Opportunity by Moving to the Cloud

Since last year, a number of sites have moved their music to cloud, including Amazon, Google and Apple. These sites have successfully stored their entire music libraries on isolated computers, and The Pirate Bay – one of the leading file-sharing sites – has followed suit. The site was reported as saying on Facebook that it has “gotten rid of the servers” and embraced cloud computing.

As stated by file-sharing blog TorrentFreak, Pirate Bay’s recent relocation to cloud will yield certain benefits for the site, including difficulty for the authorities in raiding, reduced downtime, and cost-savings. Despite the changes, however, there will be no such changes in user experience.

Presently, Pirate Bay is being hosted by two cloud-hosting companies located in two different countries. Along with that, the file-sharing site is reportedly maintaining its own hardware as well for privacy purposes. If the government gets hold of that hardware somehow, even then it would be no problem, as a backup of important data is maintained on the virtual servers.

This transfer to cloud was triggered by a prolonged outage in the early days of this month. Although at the time it was believed that the outage was due to power failure, it might actually have happened because of a raid by Swedish Police on a hosting service that the site used. Hacker collective Anonymous reacted to the raid on PRQ by declaring war against the Swedish Government. PRQ is a hosting service, with purportedly notorious clients such as the NAMBLA group.