Usenet Provider Giganews drops price of Diamond and Platinum account plans
The Usenet provider Giganews has just announced that it has made changes to several of its plans that benefit new and existing users of the service. As a long-standing user of the service, this is a welcome change considering that it is a premium Usenet service.
Tip: If you never heard of the Usenet / newsgroups before or are just getting started, check out our Usenet guide here which provides you with all there is to know about it.
The Usenet is a platform that you can connect to using applications or web interfaces. An account provides you with access to a long-standing discussion system. It is like a very big forum where users from all over the world exchange information and files.
A Usenet provider is needed to access the Usenet. While all provide you with access, what is included in the subscription plan differs highly from provider to provider. This includes binary and textual data retention, the performance of the connection, data usage limitations or additional services and features that are made available on top of that.
Giganews Usenet plans
Giganews announced today that it has decreased the price of its Diamond and Platinum accounts by $5 Dollars each, so that Diamond and Platinum accounts are now $29.99 and $19.99 per month. There have been other changes as well.
VyprVPN, the company's virtual private network service, is now also available for Platinum account subscribers inf form of a VyprVPN Basic account. It was previously only available to Diamond account subscribers, which now get access to VyprVPN Pro instead.
Last but not least, the company's own Mimo Usenet Reader is now available on all plans.
Here is the new comparison chart between Diamond and Platinum plans:
|
Diamond- $14.99/month First 3 Months |
Platinum- $19.99/month |
|
50 Usenet Connections |
20 Usenet Connections |
|
Unlimited Data Usage |
Unlimited Data Usage |
|
Full Retention |
Full Retention |
|
Dump Truck- 30 GB Online Storage |
Dump Truck- 5 GB Online Storage |
|
Mimo- Usenet Browser |
Mimo- Usenet Browser |
|
VyprVPN Pro- Personal VPN ($14.99 Value) Features include:
|
VyprVPN Basic– Personal VPN ($9.99 Value) Features include:
|
As you can see, the Diamond plan is still offering more value than the Platinum plan, at least for users who require the additional features that it offers.
Giganews offers three limited plans as well which may be interesting to users who just get started with the Usenet. Limited means that the monthly file transfer rate (to the user system) is limited to a certain size in Gigabytes.
Closing Words
The price drop may come as a surprise to many. What may have caused it is the number of alternative Usenet services that offer access to newsgroups for a lot less than Giganews does.
If you want a Usenet account and also require a VPN, then Giganews is certainly an option for that as it provides you with access to both using a single account.
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I have had very good luck with http://www.astraweb.com/. They offer pay by download plans that are a better fit for someone like me who downloads occasionally.
Giganews is listed as sponsor of the Internet Watch Foundation. The IWF is a censorship group based in the UK responsible for blocking Wikipedia in the past. They will also block illegal cartoons and what they call “extreme porn” (bondage), which is only illegal to view in the UK and legal everywhere else.
To my knowledge Giganews is the only Usenet company financing an organisation that censors the Internet. Pretty ironic when Usenet is all about free speech. There are much better and cheaper alternatives to Giganews.
Thanks for the heads-up.
Perhaps of interest to some:
Their Mimo Usenet Browser is Java software.
I dropped Giganews last month, fed up of their take-downs even on their European based servers.
Went for a provider owned and based in the Netherlands who don’t have bow down to the likes of the MPAA etc – they won’t even allow you to join if you have a non-EU IP address.
What’s they name?
http://goo.gl/kc9ldd
Thanks!
Well, actually, I didn’t save any money – I now take that $13 and pay for premium file sharing downloading… :-) In fact, I have two premium subscriptions, so I pay twice as much for my downloads (albeit faster and more convenient).
So the only result was to hurt Usenet…although I’m sure the forums are still quite alive.
I use to use Giganews for access to downloads of text books and fiction books. Used that method primarily for the last ten years and built up quite a library of reference materials.
But the posters had to change their methods of posting due to ISP’s clamping down on IP being posted, which made Usenet inconvenient for such use.
So I switched to several of the tons of Web sites that post links to file sharing sites and canceled my Giganews account. Saved myself $13 a month (I had the Silver account – which now looks MORE expensive by that graphic above) and now get all my illegal intellectual property free…
So thanks, ISPs, for trying to kill off Usenet to “save” content owners. You failed and saved me money.
That “deal” for diamond is only for the first 3 months.
Giganews itself is a huge ripoff. However there are a bunch of companies out there reselling giganews services and offering substantially better deals. I personally use Supernews, which costs $99 per year for unlimited usage. Supernews resells giganews services (actually as I understand it Giganews also owns Supernews, but I digress) so you get _literally_ the exact same usenet service for well under half the price.
You don’t get the VPN, but there are better VPN companies available also, ones that don’t retain logs indefinitely and that aren’t located in the USA. You also don’t get their newsreader or online storage but again, there are far superior options available there too.