Re:Pirate Bay Is Not Getting Rich from Bitcoin Donations
by nemothekid on Monday September 23, 2019 @04:40PM
(#21053359)
What about the search engine? I don't know what TBP concurrents is like, but I'd imagine the the search index is the most expensive part of their infra aside from bandwidth.
Re:Pirate Bay Is Not Getting Rich from Bitcoin Donations
by yellowapple on Monday September 23, 2019 @06:31PM
(#21054460)
Good point; forgot about search. I don't imagine it to be particularly sophisticated (probably just substring matching), and last I checked it has a minimum search term length (i.e. ignoring any search terms less than three characters in length); between those two factors it could probably be kept pretty simple and lightweight.
I ain't so sure of that. That'd be enough to pay off the monthly bill for a small VPS every day or so (so 15-30 VMs - or one or two giant ones - would fit in a monthly budget), or to cover the power, networking, and other colocation expenses for physical servers. TPB is a popular site, but the computational load should be minimal; the only thing TPB hosts is the metadata for the torrents (whether in the form of a small downloadable file or a magnet link); a rack of older servers (5-10 years old) should be able to handle that mostly-static load.
Banking on the idea of Bitcoin et. al. getting more valuable is probable, though.