Giganews has now 100 days of retention

The Usenet provider Giganews announced today that they will increase the retention of all binary newsgroups to 100 days over the next two weeks. If you never have heard about the Usenet before let me explain the concept with just a few words. The Usenet can be divided into binary and discussion groups. Thousands of binary groups for every purpose, from mp3 to movie to games exist and every user who has Usenet access is able to download all the files that get posted to the Usenet daily.

Talking about files, take a look at newzbin and binsearch to get a understanding what people post on the Usenet and decided for yourself if you want to give it a try. One of the best features of giganews is that they encrypt the traffic which means that your provider, and everyone else tapping the line, has no chance of finding out what you upload and download from their servers.

I always get max download speed when downloading from their fast servers, my cap is at 1.8 megabytes per second. Last but not least you should consider the following, more than 2 terabytes – that is 2000 gigabytes – of data are uploaded every day to the Usenet. This is huge if you consider the retention of 100 days which would mean that giganews currently hosts about 200 terabyte of data on their servers..

Update: A lot has changed in the last years. Giganews recently broke the 1200 day retention limit which means that customers get to access almost four years worth of data on Giganews servers. The company has also improved their server backbone providing users with unparalleled upload and download speeds.

Giganews Diamond customers get free extras with their account, including virtual private network access, a free Usenet client and soon a file hosting service called Dump Truck.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Friday February 2, 2007 -
Tags:encryption, file-sharing, giganews, newsgroups, provider, retention, secure, usenet