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AnchorDudes Usenet Newsgroup
Server FAQ
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| Best Usenet Service Providers (last updated December 24, 2008) | ||||
| Category | Provider | Plan | Price | Notes (If viewing from Europe - check out the European Usenet service providers table too!) |
| Web-Based
thumbnail viewer service |
SkinVideo
NOTE - The sign-up page is NOT office safe! |
Standard | $15
/ mo $ 40 / 3 mo |
If your primary interest is "adult" content and you don't want to mess with a newsreader program on your PC, the easiest access to adult Usenet pictures and video (OK, porn - there, we said it) is SkinVideo. They collect content from the alt.binaries.erotica.xxx and other adult newsgroups and convert it so you can view it directly online with thumbnails and video viewers - or download it in different formats for your PC or iPod. If this is what you're looking for, look no further. No uploading or posting is available through this service. |
| Unlimited NNTP downloads WITH SSL Security (Requires a newsreader program) | ||||
| More
than 150 days retention
"Gold Standard" |
Giganews Special Time - Warner Link |
Diamond | $30 /
mo $10 off first month 50% off first month for Time Warner Roadrunner, Verizon and Sprint customers |
Giganews
has the longest
retention rates, hands down. At least 5 months' storage in all
binary groups caches (avg 200+ days retention
overall > 6 months!) and more than
4 years of text-only groups. They also have the industry's
best completion rates. (They are the largest T1 Usenet
provider) If you missed a part
and it's fallen off your normal service, Giganews
probably still has it. Giganews service is
uncensored and the SSL connection
makes sure your ISP can't snoop on you. Giganews supports uploads
but does include X-trace in headers to control spammers. Since Time Warner RoadRunner is discontinuing Usenet service on June 23, 2008, and Verizon and Sprint are dropping their alt.* groups, Giganews is also offering a special discounts for new Time Warner, Sprint, and Verizon ISP customers. Use this link for the Verizon and Sprint usenet Rate. Use this link for the Time Warner RoadRunner usenet discount rate. Use this link for the AT&T usenet Rate. Binary retention is 200+ days and this account supports up to 10 simultaneous connections. You can use either their US or Amsterdam servers, and can choose which backbones to use to connect to maximize your message download speed. Giganews offers an optional usenet header compression tool to speed up downloading headers. It makes things A LOT faster. Click here to give it a try. Giganews also offers a European based server for overseas users. |
| Less
than 150 days retention
Best bang for your buck if privacy is a concern |
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| Newshosting | NHXL
|
$20 / mo $100 / 6 mo
|
Newshosting
has been a very reliable usenet service provider for
5+ years, and got even better when they were bought by a former competitor
- Highwinds. The Newshosting server farm became the premier service
for the whole company, with the best completion
rates, longest retention, and reliable front-end. The
NHXL service is their top-of-the-line and includes
SSL protection for those who either have trouble with their ISP
throttling their connection or
snooping on their activities. Binary retention is a healthy 110+ days and you get up to 20 simultaneous connections with this newsgroup plan. They have a header download accelerator tool so you don't have to wait for ever to get header lists in very large usenet groups. You can also select different backbones so you can choose the one with the fastest download speed. (NOTE: You must click a checkbox in your control panel to turn on uploading privileges before uploading) |
|
| Unlimited NNTP downloads WITHOUT SSL Security (Requires a newsreader program) | ||||
| More
than 150 days retention Best quality |
Giganews Special Time - Warner Link |
Platinum | $25/mo 20% off first month for Time Warner Roadrunner, Verizon and Sprint customers |
All
the same retention (200+
days), completion, and speed features as
Giganews Diamond, but without the SSL feature. Definitely
the usenet service to go for if superb up-time is a concern or
having the ability to grab parts of old files is a high priority. Since Time Warner RoadRunner is discontinuing Usenet service on June 23, 2008, and Verizon and Sprint are dropping their alt.* groups, Giganews is also offering a special discounts for new Time Warner, Sprint, and Verizon ISP customers. Use this link for the Verizon and Sprint usenet Discount Rate. Use this link for the Time Warner RoadRunner usenet rate. Use this link for the AT&T usenet Rate. Giganews supports uploads but does include X-trace in headers to control spammers. |
| Less
than 150 days retention
Most cost-effective services |
Powerusenet | Power User | $15 / mo $5 off for first 2 months |
Powerusenet
is operated by Giganews. They
use a separate set of servers for their Powerusenet (and Usenent.net)
customers, which provides 120+ days of binary
retention. You get up to 6
simultaneous connections with this
newsgroup plan. PowerUsenet's service is uncensored
.
Powerusenet recently added upload support, which makes it our new favorite for this price-point. |
| Metered NNTP Plans (Fixed amount per month) (Requires a newsreader program) | ||||
| Less
than 150 days retention |
Easynews |
Classic | $10 / mo | Easynews
has been one of our all-time favorites and is rock-solid.
We love their search and thumbnail preview tools
and overall support of the industry. In addition to their Classic
plan, they also offer 30Gb/mo on the
Newshosting servers with more retention, but for $15 a month (Easynews
Plus). Uploading on Easynews is restricted
until you send them an email request. Includes SSL, unlimited connections, and 90 days of retention. |
| Newsguy | Express | $10 / mo 1st month free for Verizon and Time Warner customers |
Newsguy
has also been in the industry for a long time. They've had their ups
and downs as far as reliability, but things have been pretty
smooth for the past few months. Their Express plan is cost effective
with 50GB per month. Uploading
appears to be supported. The plan includes SSL, up the 32 simultaneous connections, and up to 90 days of binary message retention. |
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| More than 150 days retention | Giganews | Silver | $13 / mo | Full
access to Giganews 200+ days of retention,
with a 25 GB monthly limit. The ideal plan for fills to complement
the service from your ISP, or as an addition to a smaller
unlimited plan from another provider. Giganews supports uploads but
does include X-trace in headers to control spammers. This plan does not include SSL, but does support 200+ days of retention and 10 concurrent streams. |
|
| Big
List of Newsgroup Server Company Reviews With a few exceptions, all the usenet sites on the market are actually selling or reselling the same 6 or 7 sets of backend newsgroup servers under different names. Basically, resellers buy gigabytes of access at quantity discounts, then resell it to end users. These resellers must provide their own billing and access control systems, as well as their own support organizations - if something goes wrong you have to go through the reseller, not the back-end provider. Additionally, since resellers buy from the big guys in large blocks of gigabytes or megabits per second, many have been known to throttle heavy users, especially on unlimited accounts, to keep from going over the quotas they have bought for resale. Few things are worse than having a fat internet pipe, and having your newsgroup service provider cut you off or restrict data flow to you because they don't want to go over budget! Generally, we don't recommend usenet resellers unless they are wholly owned by the backend company - they have the capital to install top end equipment and, most importantly, take full responsibility for support. Many times a back-end server is working fine, but the reseller's front end has failed. And while not all resellers are underfunded, many are, meaning that they often become the weakest link in the chain. It may be tempting to save a few pennies with a reseller, but in the long run, we hear the fewest complaints from people who buy directly from the primary usenet providers. This big comparison list is REALLY hard to keep up with as companies pop into existence and wink out again, and many resellers change back end newsgroup providers quite often. You may also notice that some usenet resellers appear on the list with multiple back ends - this is often how they sell different plan levels by buying from different newsgroup server back-ends. A word about usenet and uncensored versus censored newsgroups. All the major companies provide uncensored access to the newsgroups they carry. They don't monitor (except to block spam) what is posted to those groups. But the big three backbone providers (Giganews, Highwinds, and Pathlink) and most others, have recently dropped all the groups that may be associated with under-age pornography. We do not feel this is an infringement on anyone's freedom of speech (as restricting an MP3 group would be) because the content itself that would be posted is illegal, unlike general music and video which is not. |
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| Backend Provider | Sold As | Comments |
| Giganews Q - A C - Highest R - Highest S - Highest |
Giganews.com Powerusenet.com Usenet.net Rhino Newsgroups Adelphia (ISP) Speakeasy (ISP) |
In
our opinion, Giganews
is the strongest back end newsgroup provider.
They've been around for 6+ years with nearly flawless uptime in spite of
big growth in the past years. They also have nearly 4
months binary retention even on the largest movie and mp3
binary newsgroups, and multiple high speed backbones for good
speed from most corners of the country plus both US
and Netherlands servers. Giganews provides both the
backend and front-end when purchased
through Giganews, Powerusenet.com, Usenet.net, and Rhino
Newsgroups, although the retention through the Giganews
premium service is almost twice as long as on
their other services.
Giganews does not offer their services
through any other resellers except the ones they wholly operate
themselves. There are some ISP's that use Giganews as part of
their service though (Adelphia, Speakeasy). |
| Highwinds | Newshosting.com easynews.com Usenetserver.com newsdemon.com anonymousnewsfeed.com blocknews.net buzzardnews.com flashnewsgroups.com iunsenet.com maximumusenet.com meganetnews.com news4u2.com newsfeeds.com newsgroupdirect.com ngroups.net teranews.com thenewsgroups.com thundernews.com tigerusenet.com titannews.com uncensorednewsfeed.com usenet.com usenet.se usenetguide.com usenet-news.net usenetrocket.com cox.net (ISP) |
Newshosting
has been a long-time favorite with
the Anchordudes. Last year they merged with Highwinds, another
very large usenet back-end provider, and also bought out
Usenetserver.com and Easynews. Buying through Newshosting,
usenetserver.com, or easynews.com means you are getting the whole
service directly from the provider. One special note: Highwinds has different server farms for different product lines. The Usenetserver.com server farm seems to be continually troubled with downtime and packet losses, so we cannot recommend them until this clears up. Unfortunately, most of the resellers listed to the left also use the Usenetserver server farm, which means they have the same delivery problems. Highwinds has servers in the US and Europe for both speed and quality reasons. Not all their resellers have access to the European servers though. Newshosting also sells to resellers, most of whom are listed at the left. A number of these resellers are of questionable reliability and in general we do not recommend them. However, there are a few that we feel comfortable recommending because they have been around a long time and have been reliable. Look for names in bold a the left for our recommendations. |
| Thumbnail
Only Different for each Company |
Guba.com Skinvideo.com thumbnailednewsgroups.com ucache.com diiva.com newscat.com usenetbinaries.com xusenet.com |
There
are a number of companies that sit somewhere between
a standard NNTP newsgroup service that requires PC Newsreader
software, and a regular HTML website with
pictures and movies. Almost all have full uncensored
access. Most of these services are pretty good, but we
have some favorites: Skinvideo stands out for us - rock solid reliable, unlimited downloads, very usable web interface, and good retention and completion. They're on on Recommend Usenet Service list. Note: Usenetbinaries advertises as free, but you actually have to pay to use their service (they tell you after you create an account.) Seems a bit shady to us. |
| Pathlink Q - B C- Highest R- Highest S- Highest |
Newsguy.com nntpjunkie.com |
Pathlink
is another grandfather
in the usenet provider industry. They were one of the
first to implement spam filters
(Spam Hippo) , but had not been keeping up with the industry in
retention, speed, and uptime. In August they did another
big upgrade to greatly increase retention, but like the
upgrade they did last December, they lost a lot
of usenet messages and did a poor job of keeping their users informed.
It seems every time they get things settled down, they do something that
upsets the apple cart - and don't keep their users in the loop so they
experience days of unexplained downtime. We suspect their
underlying infrastructure must not be that sturdy if upgrades keep
crashing things. We really want to love
Newsguy, but their usenet support
and inconsistency keeps getting in the way. Pathlink provides both the backend and front-end when purchased through the Newsguy site. |
| News-Service Q - B C - High R - High S - Highest (in Europe) |
Eurofeeds.com news-service.com usenext.de |
A
Netherlands based usenet provider - Binary
retention 14 - 25 days depending on group. From the
reports we've gotten from users, their completion
is quite good, which is no surprise since Amsterdam is pretty
much the biggest single hub for usenet peering. Speed is pretty
good if you're in Europe, but can be a bit slow from the US. We also recommend Giganews for European users because they have Amsterdam based hub too. |
| Newsfeeds Q - B C - High R - Med S - High |
newsfeeds.com newsgroups.com usenet.com alibis.com usenet-access.com |
Newsfeeds
has been in the usenet industry for quite a
while, and at one time had many, many resellers.
Recently they reduced the number of resellers and seem to concentrate on
selling newsgroup access through their 3
primary websites: newsfeeds.com, newsgroups.com and
usenet.com. Great domain names, but reports from users are that
the service is only so-so with occasional speed and reliability
problems. Some users have reported that their retention claims are
over-rated as well, although we haven't confirmed that.
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| Supernews Q - B C - High R - Med S - Highest |
supernews.com simonnews.com core.com usenext.com airnews.com |
Supernews recently sold off it's corporate usenet service and transferred its public usenet service offering to Giganews. We're still in the process of figuring out what has / will be going on behind the scenes and will update this space as soon as we know more. It's our guess that old Supernews clients will eventually be migrated over to the lower-end Giganews server farm, but it's only a guess at this point. |
| NNTP
Server Q - B C - Highest R - Med S - High |
nntpserver.com ultrafeed.com teranews.com bubbanews.com onlynews.com sonicnews.com ultrafeed.com valuenews.com yottanews.com |
NNTP
Server has a large number of resellers,
but is not on the same scale as Giganews or Newshosting. They run
their own custom news server software
and sometimes deviate from standards causing problems with some
newsreader software. They are known for good completion rates,
which was a differentiator a couple years ago, but now almost everyone
have high completion rates. The industry seems to have standardize on $15 a month for unlimited, so you might as well go with someone well established.
|
| smsusenet | smsusenet.com download2day.com xsnews.com |
We don't know much about this service - we're researching it... |
| CW | newsreader.com active-news.com athenanews.com newsrazor.com usenetmoster.com |
All 5 of these usenet services point to the same news server farm, with newsreader.com being the primary site. We do know they've been around a long time as a second tier player - at least 5 years. Some people have have had good luck with the newsgroup providers that use CW's servers, while others have reported to us that binary newsgroups like the MP3 group are often very incomplete or have short retention. |
| Independent
/ Other Different for each Company |
altopia.com newsgroup-binaries.com newsville.com astraweb.com eweka.nl octanews.com |
With
a few exceptions, most of these are
relatively small usenet companies.
With less capital and monthly income to fall back on, they have less
redundancy in their equipment and connections, and have a hard
time recovering from crashes and hardware failures.
There are a few companies that stand out
because they have better funding or have been around for a long time: Altopia has been around for eons, and while they aren't much for retention of multipart binaries, their pricing is somewhat attractive and they've been pretty reliable over the past 2 or 3 years. Octanews isn't outstanding for retention, reliability, or any other reason than that the owner has a great history in the usenet industry and is well liked by most everyone. Astraweb may not have a great reliability rating, but they have been around for a long time and many people seem to like them. We think you're better off spending a bit more for Newshosting unlimited usenet though. Eweka is a Dutch firm with pretty good newsgroup retention and completion. Everything is in Dutch though, and worse yet, access to their servers is blocked from many countries. Try a tracert to newsreader1.eweka.nl before signing up to make sure you can access them. |
| Key
to abbreviations: Q = Quality / Reliability (A,B,C) C = Completion (Highest = 99%, High = 95%+, Med = 90%) R = Retention (Highest = 75+ days, High = 50+ days, Med = 25+ days) S = Speed (Subjective, based mostly on server loads, not backbone connections) |
||
|
Check out these cool
t-shirts, mousepads, mugs, and stuff we made in our free time
|
|
Some of Anchordudes'
friends on the web: |