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After the much publicized and heavily criticized takedown of the controversial, celebrity-endorsed Megaupload, The Pirate Bay drastically changed their web site to circumvent censorship attempts from all arms of the law.  Many wanted TPB to be taken down, especially the movie industry, claiming that they are losing billions of dollars because of piracy.

TPB even stated that they were planning of hosting parts of their site in GPS-controlled drones instead of data centers, which are vulnerable to raids and shut downs from authorities.  Hosting their files above ground is explained simply as something they need to do, as staying in the ground no longer feels appropriate for them.

But it seems like their GPS-controlled drones plan was put on hold as they are now hosting their files in the cloud.

The Pirate Bay isn’t catching any breaks, as they recently suffered a number of setbacks, including the arrest of co-founder Gottfrid Warg in Cambodia, Google removing TPB and BitTorrent from instant search suggestions, and being blocked by Dutch internet service providers.

These are just some of the reasons why TPB decided to seek refuge in the cloud, aside from the fact that it would cut costs, ensure better up-time, and fingers crossed, be safer from raids.  The move was made yesterday unbeknownst to many users, as the site only experienced five-minutes of downtime.

“Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent,” The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak.

The move to the cloud is quite cunning.  First off, the cloud service providers are from different countries and they’re using  load balancers and transit-routers, also from different countries, that hides the cloud providers’ locations.  Perhaps the best part about their cloud move is that the cloud providers have no idea that they’re providing cloud hosting for TPB.

Still, TPB is not taking any chances, as they know there’s still a possibility that authorities can hunt them down so they’ve added another fail-safe method in case their transit-router and load balancer gets taken down, all their data will be backed up externally on virtual machines which can be re-installed on any cloud hosting providers anywhere in the world.

“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 says.

“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 added.