The main reason is quality and experience. Usenet providers who offer bargain accounts might run into problems eventually that might lead to situations with to many users and to little resources so that the aforementioned connection and download problems appear again.

Giganews is the quality Usenet provider and I’m more than happy to pay for that quality. What I like is that you can cap your line day and night without problems no matter if it is a 16 Mbit connection or a 50 Mbit connection (if I would have access to 100 Mbit I would love to test their servers then as well). They provide a tool called Giganews Accelerator that uses compression to download newsgroup headers 6-10 times as fast. Everyone who ever downloaded more than a million pages from a group knows how long this can take without compression.

Giganews has now reached the milestone of 400 days of data retention. This means that they keep the data that gets uploaded to the Usenet for 400 days on their servers. This must be an unbelievable amount of data as upload traffic per day exceeds several Terabytes (Giganews mentioned it exceeds 5 Terabytes per day in February 2009) these days. 400 days of retention means that Giganews users can go back and search in those 400 days for data that they would like to download.

You guys know that I never advertise services on Ghacks unless I personally use and like them. Giganews is one of the few that I can recommend to anyone. They constantly improve their service and never let me down in the past.

Here is a short list of what you need to get started working with the Usenet:

• You need a Usenet Provider that is providing the access to the Usenet. I recommend Giganews but there are others out there as well.
• You need a software program to access the Usenet. I personally use the commercial Newsbin Pro client but there are free ones out there like Alt.Binz or Grabit.
• You need some good Usenet search engines. You can use these search engines to search for files that have been posted to the Usenet. Users who are interested in getting a Usenet account might want to use these search engines first to see what the Usenet has to offer.

And that’s it. There are lots of guides and tutorials out there that help Usenet newcomers. If you have any questions let me know and I try to answer them in the comments here.