Pirate Bay hosting machines on cheap, small drones(thepiratebay.se) |
Pirate Bay hosting machines on cheap, small drones(thepiratebay.se) |
Such devices would need to return land on a regular basis even if helped by solar panels. The costs of maintaining a significant number of this nodes floating would be considerable.
Also the delay on the communications would also be significant compared to a normal server. If you take the low computational power of a Raspberry Pi and put it with a 100Mbps radio (effective data rate would be less), the result would be a very slow website.
I'm not sure about their availability claims either. "With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away". With modern radio transmitters, I think you can also quickly localise the earth-bound part of the system and either close it down, or create enough interference to make the transfer almost impossible... I'm not an expert on radio though - can someone confirm/refute this?
- power needed
- weather situation can screw things up
- a node needed on the ground. while servers cant be seized, the ground station and local laws still needed.