But Giganews has not only added other services, they have also constantly improved the retention, performance and quality of their core service. The company just a few days ago reached 1200 days of retention for all binary newsgroups. This basically means that Giganews customers have access to information and files that date back almost three and a half year. That’s a big milestone, especially since all those information and files are accessible with the same performance and completion rate (that is 100%).

I honestly cannot say if the 1200 days of retention are more than any other Usenet provider offers, or if the upload and download speeds are faster. It would be very difficulty to prove, considering that you would need accounts with all comparable services on the Internet.

What I do know is that I’m a happy customer. When I download, I max my 50 Mbit connection every time, and I have the feeling that I would also max faster connections.

The most interesting account package is the Diamond package in my opinion. The reason for this is not because of the unlimited Usenet downloads or SSL connections, as other packages offer that as well. The core reason is the free VPN that you get with the package. VyprVPN has servers in several countries that you can connect to, including the United States, United Kingdom and France. If you are not sure what you can do with it, check out this article: Use VyprVPN To Access US-Only Websites or check out the core service review here. As a webmaster, the service is indispensable, for instance to check how your site is ranking in search engines.

The price is still higher than at comparable Usenet providers. If you do not need a VPN or another of the free services you may want to look at the Platinum account instead which is available for $10 less.

Are you making use of the Usenet? If so, what’s the provider and software that you are using?

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.

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.