The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines

&quot; This saved costs, guaranteed better uptime, and made the site more portable and thus harder to take down &quot;<p>Probably not true for &quot; This saved costs &quot;. From what i&#x27;ve seen, virtual machines usually cost more than twice the price of renting the equivalent &quot;real&quot; machine monthly.<p>They could have used dedicated servers; there are more dedicated server providers than VM providers, thus achieving the same goal, less expensively.<p>Probably not true for &quot; better uptime &quot; either; VMs are still hosted on real hardware, which fails, too. (Although distributing the work on more independent machines can improve uptime.)

If the load balancer is the weak point that would be first to be discovered, then I imagine they must have some mechanism to stop it leaving evidence that leads to the other machines if it were to get raided (it isn&#x27;t on their hardware, so they can&#x27;t prevent the files being backed up).<p>Is there a way the codebase could be entirely encrypted and not even accessible to the cloud provider (with some &#x27;boot password&#x27; needed each time the server starts up)?

&quot;At the time of writing the site uses 21 virtual machines (VMs) hosted at different providers. [...] All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers.&quot;

Why can&#x27;t people find where their servers? I understand they have their own IP allocation, thus they can use BGP tricks. But don&#x27;t they need a sympathetic ISP or similar to help them get the routes in?

Interesting, so I&#x27;m presuming there&#x27;s several VPNs involved between the load-balancer and all the discrete servers. I wonder if they use a VPN provider with a static IP and no-logs policy or if it&#x27;s simply yet another VPS.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear a little more about the architecture.

&gt; In total the VMs use 182 GB of RAM and 94 CPU cores. The total storage capacity is 620 GB, but that’s not all used.<p>That level of hardware&#x2F;cores seems a bit over the top given what TPB does.<p>When I was a boy we had this thing called &#x27;Alta Vista&#x27;. It was <i>the</i> search engine before Bing! came along. Processors did not run at gigahertz speeds back then and a large disk was 2Gb. Nonetheless most offices had the internet and when people went searching &#x27;Alta Vista&#x27; was the first port of call for many.<p>TPB has an index of a selective part of the internets, i.e. movies, software, music, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, back in the 1990&#x27;s, AltaVista indexed everything, as in the entire known internets, with everything stored away in less than the 620Gb used by TPB for their collection of &#x27;stolen&#x27; material.<p>From <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AltaVista</a><p>Alta Vista is a very large project, requiring the cooperation of at least 5 servers, configured for searching huge indices and handling a huge Internet traffic load. The initial hardware configuration for Alta Vista is as follows:<p>Alta Vista -- AlphaStation 250 4&#x2F;266 4 GB disk 196 MB memory Primary web server for gotcha.com Queries directed to WebIndexer or NewsIndexer<p>NewsServer -- AlphaStation 400 4&#x2F;233 24 GB of RAID disks 160 MB memory News spool from which news index is generated Serves articles (via http) to those without news server<p>NewsIndexer -- AlphaStation 250 4&#x2F;266 13 GB disk 196 MB memory Builds news index using articles from NewsServer Answers news index queries from Alta Vista<p>Spider -- DEC 3000 Model 900 (replacement for Model 500) 30 GB of RAID disk 1GB memory Collects pages from the web for WebIndexer<p>WebIndexer -- Alpha Server 8400 5&#x2F;300 210 GB RAID disk (expandable) 4 GB memory (expandable) 4 processors (expandable) Builds the web index using pages sent by Spider. Answers web index queries from Alta Vista