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I'm sorry, am I the only one that isn't impressed by this? I'm actually quite stunned that they are treating this like some new discovery. Pop onto HN any day a

I'm sorry, am I the only one that isn't impressed by this? I'm actually quite stunned that they are treating this like some new discovery. Pop onto HN any day and see thousands of people talking about cloud. Hell, some local IT staffing agency in my area has a billboard about cloud servers. Cloud is mainstream now, why did it take TPB so long to catch up? //Sorry if it sounds like trolling

michaelt 14y ago
We see lots of stories about people running on EC2 and similar services, but the big players are all pretty straight-laced; witness the speed with which Amazon kicked off Wikileaks [1] - within about three days. I don't know how many cloud hosing providers there are - to judge from the way people talk here there's only EC2 and maybe Linode. You'd need a lot of providers if you need a new one every 3 days! [1] http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/amazon-drops-wikileaks.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/amazon-drops-wikil...
- chii 14y ago
  But then if the traffic between the loadbalancer and the actual server is vpn'ed, you can just sign up using another credit card with another person, and the host will be none-the-wiser again. That is, until they get another C&D letter. The game then repeats. I think eventually, something has to give tho, but hopefully, it will be a while before that happens.
- stock_toaster 14y ago
  There are quite a few. Many offer "private clouds" too. If you additionally consider "hardware clouds" like softlayer, Hertzner, etc... there are even more possibilities.
Jare 14y ago
It doesn't have to be completely new to be interesting. TPB's case is slightly different from most cloud setups, in that their primary need is mobility not scalability. So, where most cloud backends will try to be as tight as availability and pricing allows, TPB wants and needs to spread across (or be ready to move to) as many different providers, datacenters and countries as possible.
dagw 14y ago
You missed the interesting bit. It's not that they're hosting on a cloud service that is interesting, it's how they've set up a completely transient hosting solution. Non of their cloud hosts know what they're hosting. There is no traceable connection between the IP number of www.thepiratebay.se and the cloud host. Any single cloud hosting service can kick them off their servers without it affecting the web site. If the connection between cloud host and load balancer is lost the cloud image encrypts itself and becomes useless. Sure nothing they're doing is particularly novel, but if you're the sort of person who wants to host in the cloud, but needs to keep a website responding even when cloud hoster goes down (or decides to ban you), you should find something interesting about their setup.
- pyre 14y ago
  > the cloud image encrypts itself and becomes useless Sounds more like they are using full disk encryption, and the system just shuts down, requiring a password to boot up again.

michaelt 14y ago

We see lots of stories about people running on EC2 and similar services, but the big players are all pretty straight-laced; witness the speed with which Amazon kicked off Wikileaks [1] - within about three days. I don't know how many cloud hosing providers there are - to judge from the way people talk here there's only EC2 and maybe Linode. You'd need a lot of providers if you need a new one every 3 days! [1] http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/amazon-drops-wikileaks.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/amazon-drops-wikil...

chii 14y ago
But then if the traffic between the loadbalancer and the actual server is vpn'ed, you can just sign up using another credit card with another person, and the host will be none-the-wiser again. That is, until they get another C&D letter. The game then repeats. I think eventually, something has to give tho, but hopefully, it will be a while before that happens.
stock_toaster 14y ago
There are quite a few. Many offer "private clouds" too. If you additionally consider "hardware clouds" like softlayer, Hertzner, etc... there are even more possibilities.

Jare 14y ago

It doesn't have to be completely new to be interesting. TPB's case is slightly different from most cloud setups, in that their primary need is mobility not scalability. So, where most cloud backends will try to be as tight as availability and pricing allows, TPB wants and needs to spread across (or be ready to move to) as many different providers, datacenters and countries as possible.

dagw 14y ago

You missed the interesting bit. It's not that they're hosting on a cloud service that is interesting, it's how they've set up a completely transient hosting solution. Non of their cloud hosts know what they're hosting. There is no traceable connection between the IP number of www.thepiratebay.se and the cloud host. Any single cloud hosting service can kick them off their servers without it affecting the web site. If the connection between cloud host and load balancer is lost the cloud image encrypts itself and becomes useless. Sure nothing they're doing is particularly novel, but if you're the sort of person who wants to host in the cloud, but needs to keep a website responding even when cloud hoster goes down (or decides to ban you), you should find something interesting about their setup.

pyre 14y ago
> the cloud image encrypts itself and becomes useless Sounds more like they are using full disk encryption, and the system just shuts down, requiring a password to boot up again.