Born just over 12 months ago, RARBG is a pretty big site to stay off most people’s radar. Tracking over 50,000 torrents and clocking up 1.1 million unique visits per month, the site (which has open signups) was previously hosted in Bulgaria but after attracting the attention of the police it more recently moved to the Netherlands-based host, LeaseWeb.
The move prompted the admins to work on an international version of the site which caused it to rapidly gain in popularity. It now has over 100,000 users, with its tracker reporting 185,000 seeds and 178,000 leechers.
Of course, with popularity comes more attention from anti-piracy outfits, the most famous one in the Netherlands being BREIN. Accordingly, BREIN has put pressure on LeaseWeb who in turn has advised its customer, RARBG, that it has 48 hours to shut down the site – or LeaseWeb will do it for them.
So what makes it so easy for BREIN to shut down the site? In 2007, LeaseWeb, once one of the largest BitTorrent hosts, was ordered by a court to shut down the relatively unknown BitTorrent tracker everlasting.nu. Leaseweb actually appealed the court’s decision to shut down the site but lost, and was ordered to hand over the admin’s personal details. The overall result was an exodus of BitTorrent sites from LeaseWeb, including the likes of BTjunkie, Demonoid, What.cd and Waffles.fm.
TorrentFreak spoke with the admin of RARBG who told us he intends to move the site out of the Netherlands and into the current BitTorrent safe-haven of Sweden. Asked about plans for the future, he responded, “To keep the site up, whatever it takes.”
Update: RARBG has successfully moved to Sweden.
