The Pirate Bay goes cloud-based to stymie police raids

The world's best-known BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay, yesterday switched over to cloud-based hosting in an effort to cut costs, improve uptime and data security but most of all, make itself almost invulnerable to police raids.

Filesharing news site TorrentFreak reported the move to the cloud resulted in five minutes downtime and was hardly noticeable for users.

From now on, The Pirate Bay will run on virtual machines instead of physical servers. The VMs are currently hosted in cloud hosting companies in two different countries and can easily be moved elsewhere.

The companies have no idea that they're hosting The Pirate Bay but even if they found out, it would be impossible for them to gather data on users as all communication goes through an encrypted loadbalancer which is in a different country than the virtual servers and transit router, according to TorrentFreak.

This set up makes The Pirate Bay more raid-proof, it believes, even if in a worst-case scenario it lost its loadbalancer and transit router.

“If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images,” The Pirate Bay said.

“They have to be quick about it too, if the servers have been out of communication with the load balancer for 8 hours they automatically shut down. When the servers are booted up, access is only granted to those who have the encryption password,” they add.

"Winston Brahma" wrote about the move on The Pirate Bay's blog today.

In 2006, The Pirate Bay was raided by 65 Swedish police officers to shut it down, and its four founders were later convicted of copyright infringement and received prison sentences and fines.

Despite this and further threats of police raids, the site has continued to operate more or less uninterrupted.