The Pirate Bay upgrades server hardware

The Pirate Bay is embarking on its largest hardware upgrade since launching in 2003.

The group, which has faced raids on its data centre, as well as direct and indirect legal battles, has just ordered 10 new high-memory servers to strengthen its resilience, according to the TorrentFreak blog. 

The gear will be a major step up from its original equipment, which was housed in a single 19-inch rack shown here by the group. 

The world’s most well-known torrent tracker site once ran its web server and database on two 1.3 GHz Celeron servers with 256 MB memory, and its tracker on a 256 MB memory Toshiba laptop, according to figures. 

Eight 12 GB and two 24 GB RAM 5620 Xeon machines had arrived at a “mountain cave” near the city of Malmö in Sweden’s south -- The Pirate Bay's new location after ditching its Stockholm and Göteborg hide-outs, according to the report. 

Though it did not cite sources, the publication noted that the hardware upgrade “will ensure more redundancy for the site” after this week's installation.  

But the new equipment can only prevent some attacks on its availability. Last year, for example, a court injunction against its German ISP supplier knocked The Pirate Bay out briefly. 

That outage came after a 2006 raid on its data centre prompted the group to take “extreme” backup measures and to ensure the location of its servers remained secret, according to TorrentFreak.