In the last year or two the entertainment industries have targeted many BitTorrent sites. The majority of the verdicts against these sites have thus far ruled in favor of the copyright holders. Only in Spain have BitTorrent sites been repeatedly found to operate within the boundaries of the law.

Of all the BitTorrent related websites OpenBitTorrent has been one of the most surprising targets. The tracker, which doesn’t link to or host any torrent files and is not linked to any torrent search engine, merely serves as a facilitator of the communication between torrent users, much like BitTorrent clients do.

Despite this neutral and apparent non-infringing setup, the Swedish Court of Appeals ruled against the site two weeks ago. In a surprising verdict in a case started by Hollywood movie companies, the Court handed out an injunction to OpenBitTorrent’s hosting provider Portlane, ordering it to cease to provide Internet access to the tracker.

The OpenBitTorrent site and tracker returned a few hours ago

Following this decision OpenBitTorrent was pulled offline. TorrentFreak contacted the operators of the site who told us that they would be looking for a new hosting provider to bring back their tracker, so it could continue to coordinate the communications between the millions of people that were using it daily.

Today, we were informed that OpenBitTorrent has finally found a new hosting company, interestingly enough one that is run by a Spanish company. Just hours after the tracker and its website returned, some 20 million peers spread over 200,000 torrents were already connected to the tracker and business continued as usual.

OpenBitTorrent is currently battling for the title of the worlds largest BitTorrent tracker with PublicBitTorrent, another standalone tracker that runs on the Opentracker software. Both trackers handle the communications of between 20 and 30 million BitTorrent users at any given time of the day.

Although it’s good to see that OpenBitTorrent has been resurrected, it’s worth noting that the majority of all BitTorrent users probably never noticed that it had disappeared. Most torrents today come with several backup trackers that are used in case one goes down, and even without trackers at all DHT ensures that downloads continue to work.

Update: Site and tracker seem to be down again, no word on what’s causing the downtime but we assume that it will be resolved quickly.

Compared to a year ago the BitTorrent landscape has changed significantly. The Pirate Bay decided to shut down its tracker last fall and a few weeks later Mininova partly shut down its website. However, with the fall of Mininova many new torrent sites emerged, with KickassTorrents being the most successful one.

It almost seems like history is repeating itself. Early 2005, just a few weeks after that period’s leading torrent site, Suprnova.org, closed its doors, Mininova was founded. In the years that followed the site grew out to become the most visited torrent site. That growth was stunted in November 2009, when a negative verdict in a court battle against the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN forced the operators of the site to remove over a million torrents.

As expected Mininova’s decision resulted in a disastrous drop in traffic, as its users spread out over other torrent sites including some promising newcomers. Today, three months after Mininova’s downfall, the site is about to disappear from the top 10 list of most visited torrent sites. The Pirate Bay is currently leading the list closely followed by the meta-search engine Torrentz and isoHunt. KickassTorrents is currently in 9th place, which is a remarkable achievement consdering the site is only a few months old.

Below you’ll find a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.

#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG- Daily Visitors: 4,600,136 - Pageviews: 26,036,770 (5.66 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #101 - Compete Rank: #724 Visit Site | Full Report
#2 TORRENTZ.COM- Daily Visitors: 2,756,280 - Pageviews: 13,781,400 (5 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #167 - Compete Rank: Currently Not Available Visit Site | Full Report
#3 ISOHUNT.COM- Daily Visitors: 2,285,811 - Pageviews: 15,497,799 (6.78 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #187 - Compete Rank: #1,187 Visit Site | Full Report
#4 BTJUNKIE.ORG- Daily Visitors: 1,363,883 - Pageviews: 6,423,889 (4.71 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #367 - Compete Rank: #2,055 Visit Site | Full Report
#5 TORRENTREACTOR.NET- Daily Visitors: 919,552 - Pageviews: 1,783,931 (1.94 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #737 - Compete Rank: #3,035 Visit Site | Full Report
#6 DEMONOID.COM- Daily Visitors: 728,513 - Pageviews: 5,383,711 (7.39 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #626 - Compete Rank: #4,640 Visit Site | Full Report
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET- Daily Visitors: 686,219 - Pageviews: 1,331,265 (1.94 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,050 - Compete Rank: #3,435 Visit Site | Full Report
#8 MONOVA.ORG- Daily Visitors: 670,536 - Pageviews: 1,562,349 (2.33 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,004 - Compete Rank: #6,846 Visit Site | Full Report
#9 KICKASSTORRENTS.COM- Daily Visitors: 642,498 - Pageviews: 2,634,242 (4.1 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #859 - Compete Rank: #4,347 Visit Site | Full Report
#10 MININOVA.ORG- Daily Visitors: 632,519 - Pageviews: 1,872,256 (2.96 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #987 - Compete Rank: #3,257 Visit Site | Full Report

Replacing The Pirate Bay is easier said then done. The tracker is currently responsible for approximately half of all public torrent transfers, which represents a significant percentage of global Internet traffic.

However, history has shown that BitTorrent users are an adaptive species that simply migrates to the next site when their home bases become uninhabitable.

While private trackers certainly have their place and will accommodate those lucky enough to get an invite, for this article we are interested in sites that are open to everyone, ranging from full Pirate Bay replacements to a do-it-yourself setup.

Full Pirate Bay Alternatives

The only full Pirate Bay alternatives are sites that index torrent files, are open to everyone and also have a working tracker. Unfortunately, there are only a few sites out there that offer this full package -there are four of them below. We decided to include Demonoid here because it tracks many public torrents.

1. Torrentbox

2. 1337x

3. H33t

4. Demonoid (semi-private)

Torrent Indexers

Torrent indexers are sites that have a searchable directory of torrent files, but don’t host a (public) tracker of their own. Mininova has a tracker, but they only allow ‘featured’ torrents uploaded through their content distribution service. The most used torrent indexers are:

5. Mininova

6. isoHunt

7. Torrentreactor

8. BTjunkie

Torrent Meta-Seach Engines

BitTorrent meta-search engines are yet another brand of torrent sites. They don’t have a tracker and don’t host any torrent files on their servers. Instead they search for and link to torrents hosted on third party sites.

9. Torrentz

10. Nowtorrents

11. Qtorrents

12. Torrent-Finder

Private Trackers (open signup)

Most of the larger private trackers require an invite to join, but there are always a few that allow new members. Below are four of these (open) private trackers and more can be found on Btracs.

13. RTN

14. BiteMyTorrent

15. BitShock

16. TorrentIt

Standalone BitTorrent Trackers

Torrent indexers and meta-search engines can be used to find torrents, but none of them will be of much use without a stable BitTorrent tracker. Standalone BitTorrent trackers are much needed, they handle the communication between downloaders but don’t index any torrents themselves.

17. OpenBitTorrent

18. PublicBitTorrent

19. The Hidden Tracker

20. Denis.Stalker

DIY Pirate Bay Alternatives

The last category of Pirate Bay alternatives are the do-it-yourself projects. By using the three ingredients below The Pirate Bay can be easily rebuilt. It might take a few hours, but then the path to world domination is clear.

21. Pirate Bay Torrents Clone

22. Pirate Bay HTML Clone

23. Torrage: Torrent API

24. Tracker Software

Last but not Least

Google, the mother of all search engines has a filetype:torrent search command that allows you to find torrent files scattered across the Internet. Also, Google’s custom search allows everyone to create their own torrent search engine. Don’t tell the MPAA and RIAA.

25. Google

If you think we missed any good alternatives, please feel free to add your own in the comment section below, while clearly noting which category they fit into.