isoHunt: Six Years Old Already

One of the most popular BitTorrent index sites in the world, isoHunt, whose owner Gary Fung is known as a young and intrepid admin, is celebrating its 6th year in the p2p world. As he couldn’t really work out what was the exact day the site came into existence, Fung picked yesterday as the day for celebration.

"Oh and hope you had a happy new year! And happy birthday to us, isoHunt is now 6 years old (I don't remember which day I launched the site, but it was January 2003)"

isoHunt has over 1.4 million torrents in its database and 16 million peers from indexed torrents. Those approximately 7.4 million unique visitors (as of May 2006), turned isoHunt into one of the largest BitTorrent search engines. Each day there are thousands of new torrents added or deleted (for a number of reasons) from the site keeping it alive and kicking. Typically, isoHunt users perform over 40 million unique searches montly. On Oct 19, 2008, isoHunt went over the 1 petabyte mark for torrents indexed globally.

Though in its early days isoHunt was an IRC search engine (and BitTorrent was far from the giant it is today) Gary Fung’s intuition dictated him to add BitTorrent capability to his search engine and God, was he right!

However, risks came with the new territory – about two years ago, isoHunt and TorrentSpy were targeted by the MPAA under the charges of copyright infringement. That meant the end for TorrentSpy which also had to accept a $100 million settlement but isoHunt proved luckier due to its location in Canada and managed to stay fully functional.

We here at P2POn sincerely wish congratulate Gary for what he’s done for the p2p communities so far and wish him the best of luck for the (hopefully) another six years to follow.