BitSnoop was one of the most successful new torrent site launches of 2009. The site started out indexing a healthy 1,480,666 torrents and users particularly seemed to like the usability and its clean interface.
It went public in October last year and quickly gained a steady user base in the months that followed. Unfortunately, the site suddenly disappeared in February due to several crucial mistakes.
“Our host has screwed up hard drive replacement in RAID array,” the BitSnoop team informed TorrentFreak. “They’ve replaced the wrong drive two times in a row, which caused all data to be destroyed. We did not have full backup at that moment, so it was partly our fault.”
BitSnoop eventually returned in May this year and not without leaving an impression. The torrent indexer started from zero and is without a doubt the fastest growing torrent site of the year. Not only in traffic, but also in the library of indexed torrents that keeps on expanding.
This week the site reached a new milestone when the 10 millionth torrent was added to the index.
At the time of writing BitSnoop has 10,211,341 indexed torrents, of which 3,703,060 are currently active. These numbers make the site one of the largest torrent databases that we know of, nearing the range of established sites such as Torrentz and isoHunt, and beating KickassTorrents and The Pirate Bay by a a few million torrents.
Some additional mind-boggling statistics:
In terms of visitors the site has been doing well too. It’s currently on its way to entering the top 10 most visited torrent sites on the Internet with well over a million page views a day. Needless to say, servicing these numbers requires quite a lot of hardware. The BitSnoop team was kind enough to give us a sneak peak behind the scenes and find out what’s powering the BitTorrent indexer.
BitSnoop’s data crunching box and indexer backend both run on Dual 4-core Xeons 2.33 GHz, with 32 GB RAM and SAS disks in RAID10. The search query server is a 4-core Xeon 2.6 GHz, with 16 GB RAM and SATA in RAID1. The web frontends are VPSes, and some small VPSes for utility and infrastructure purposes. All the current hardware is rented but BitSnoop’s plans to buy their own servers in the near future.
The BitSnoop team further assured TorrentFreak that they will do all they can to keep the site running smoothly. The main focus for future improvements will be on usability. Currently they are working on several new features including a ‘TV show finder’, improved detection of fake files, some social features and tag based browsing and searches.
And most importantly, more torrents will be indexed, with 15 million being the next big milestone.
In relatively little time BitSnoop has become an established name in the public BitTorrent community. The site offers one of the best API’s that’s currently in use by several other torrent sites, and they also collaborate with academic researchers who wish to learn more about the BitTorrent ecosystem.
It definitely looks like BitSnoop is here to stay, and despite a difficult start of the year with months of downtime, it deserves to be crowned the fastest growing BitTorrent site of 2010. They hereby follow in the footsteps of KickassTorrents, who ‘won’ this unofficial (but honorary) title last year.
