Giganews is quite expensive, costing $25/month for a unlimited package. The retention and speed made up for this, but I have recently started to investigate alternative.

A friend referred me to Newshosting, a USENET provider which is beginning to roll out 250 day retention. Newshosting is slightly cheaper than Giganews, costing $15/month for an unlimited package. This sounded really good, but I decided to check alternatives.

On Newzleech, I spotted that Astraweb are increasing their retention to 270 days. Astraweb costs the same as Newshosting, $15/month for an unlimited package (or $10/month for a package with unlimited downloads capped at 1Mbit/second). However, Astraweb also offers a pay-as-you-go scheme; users can pay $10 for 25GB bandwidth or $25 for 120GB which they can use over any period of time. This is useful for light downloaders who download more than the cheapest packages Giganews provide for but only use about half of their monthly allowance. At the time of writing Astraweb are currently providing discounts, $11/month for an unlimited package.

Unfortunately, these increased retentions are not being provided at the moment. Rather, every day instead of deleting the one they would usually delete they are keeping it, waiting until they catch up with their promised retentions. Astraweb announced their increased retention from 160 days to 270 days on 31 Dec, so we’ll have to wait until mid-March until we can enjoy the full retentions.

Both Newshosting and Astraweb have American and European servers and Astraweb provides free SSL with all packages (on Giganews and Newshosting there’s an extra fee for SSL).

I cannot vouch for either service personally, although a trusted person has given me nothing but positive reviews for Newshosting.

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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..

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