Usenet providers dramatically increase retention

Joe
Jan 10, 2009
Updated • Jun 9, 2013
Internet
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7

In July 2008, Giganews made big news for increasing their USENET retention to 240 days. Most other providers had a maximum of about 160 days, but several of these are now promising to surpass Giganews.

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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Comments

  1. Will said on March 31, 2010 at 1:04 am
    Reply

    I’ve had a usenetserver.com account for 2 years. Maxes out my download at 2MB/s and free SSL too. Very happy with them.

    I’m looking into http://www.bintube.com/usenet/ now.

    $10.99 / month, 590 days retention, Free SSL

    And best part is that you get http://www.bintube.com/player/ for free. So sweet. Download the 14 day trial version and check it out.

  2. mrogi said on February 8, 2009 at 4:27 pm
    Reply

    Always choose the biggest, the fastest and the best. Giganews is the drug of choice.

  3. Trephined said on January 14, 2009 at 10:30 pm
    Reply

    Newshosting provides SSL with their NHXL or NHLite packages.
    I pay for a year at a time to get a discount rate.

  4. Bruno said on January 14, 2009 at 1:55 am
    Reply

    lol, when I started to use usenet my retention was 24 hours! the next step was 48 hours :D but I was happy like child.

    I have used $15/month Newshosting for many years, but now I want SSL too, I’ll take a look to Astraweb (with $10/month for a package with unlimited downloads capped at 1Mbit/second), I’ll check advices about his qualities.

  5. Jo said on January 10, 2009 at 1:06 pm
    Reply

    too bad you cant use a subscription based model with paypal without a creditcard in germany.

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