- Four things really matter when choosing
binary usenet servers:
- What you need to know:
- The third most important issue for
for most users when choosing a Usenet company is Completion
and Retention.
- Most premium usenet services are now
sufficiently inter-linked so that 95+% article completion is
pretty much a given. In the early days of Usenet, many
providers could not reliable receive even 75% of the messages
broadcast, so conversations and binary files were often
incomplete and unusable. Only ISP's have less than 90%
completion now.
- A bare minimum should of 14 days
retention. ISP's often only have 3-5 days of
retention. Many premium usenet providers have one level of
retention for binary files (which take up a lot of space), and
another for text files (which take up less space).
- Days of Retention are important because
Usenet newsgroup service providers don't
have unlimited disk space, so they have to purge old messages
from all the newsgroups over time. First in, first out, so
the oldest stuff gets purged - they don't store a number
of days, they store a number of bytes.
Once a message is purged from the server, you can't download it
to your local computer. There's no going back.
- The shorter the retention period, the
more often you need to log on to check for files and
discussions.
14 days retention is considered the minimum because a "flood"
of traffic, often 4 or 5 times the normal daily level, is
not uncommon. Unless you want to be a slave to Usenet we
recommend a server with at least 21 days
of binary newsgroup retention and 90 days of text retention.
Thankfully, most premium newsgroup providers have at least this
level of retention.
- Our retention days ratings on the Newsgroup
Servers Ratings page are based on a mixture of binary
newsgroups, including picture,
movie, and MP3 groups.
- In general, go for the longest retention
you can afford. You never know when you'll need to go back
to part of a conversation or pick up part of a file from a
couple months ago.
- The longest retention available is provided
by Giganews with a whopping
180 days of retention.
Easynews has a cool web interface so you can easily search
for an pick out individual parts that you may have missed in
earlier downloads and has 30+ days retention.
Newshosting's retention
is also quite good, 100+ days in most binary groups.
- More than you wanted to know
- Most ISP's and lower-priced usenet services
have to purge old messages after only about 3 days.
- There is a lot of traffic on Usenet,
well over 1.5 TB a day. That takes a LOT of disk space
to store. Especially if you mirror it in case a drive
fails. And traffic continues to grow
as more people post pictures, movies, MP3s, and even
complete warez CD's. At some point the usenet news
group service providers hard disks simply run out of
room. So they have to purge old messages to make room
for new ones.
- Usenet message retention rates come into
play for two reasons:
- Multi-part messages often take
different paths to any given server, and therefore take
differing amounts of time to arrive. If a message has
500 parts, it might take 48 hours or more for all the parts to
arrive on a given usenet news group server. If the
server only retains articles for 48 hours, the first parts
will have been deleted before the last parts arrive, and you
will not be able to download the complete file. (See
Article Completion Rates page)
- If you don't log on daily, or simply
don't have time to check ALL your favorite groups every
other day, even complete articles can be cycled off the
server by the time you log on. Once the message is
gone from the usenet news group server, there's no way to retrieve
it.
- How are retention rates determined?
- Newsgroup servers are typically set up
with a default amount of disk space set aside for each
newsgroup that the server retains. The administrator
can then over-ride the retention setting for individual news
groups.
- Binary files take up much more space
than text files, so administrators typically define more
space for binary newsgroups. Administrators may also
define more space for groups that are particularly
active. Some newsgroups only have 5 or 6 posts a day,
while others have over a thousand. Finding the right
size for each newsgroup is an art that takes some time to
develop.
- Calculating an exact number of
"days" of retention is not really practical, as
the days of retention really depends on how active a group
is. At best, a vendor shoots for an average number of
retention days for a group based on size. A quiet
group with only 5 posts a day may be able to store 40 days
of activity in only 5 MB. But if there is a
"flood" of new files posted, that 5MB could get
used up in 3 hours, making the retention rate less than a
day!
- Additionally, some groups are more
popular than others, so newsgroup server administrators give
them extra space to keep articles longer than in other, less
popular groups. So while a while a commercial usenet
server provider may say they have an average of14 days of
retention for binaries, they may actually only have 7 days
in an unpopular group, and 24 in a popular one.
- Spam can take up a lot of space on a
newsgroup server. Many providers implement spam
filters not so much to save their members from having to
wade through it, but to free up more space for real
messages.
- Some usenet server companies also
remove incomplete multi-part messages. This can free
up a LOT of space. A 40 MB file that is missing one
part is useless to their users, so they delete it.
This frees up 40 MB for keeping a complete article a day
longer. Some users like this idea as the complete
articles are kept longer. Other users hate this idea,
as it means they don't have a chance to get at least part of
a file that they may be able to piece together by other
means.
- Web interface sites benefit from both
the spam removal and incomplete remove logic, because they
only keep the complete messages that can be combined into
binary files. Therefore, some of the longest retention
rates are available through the companies that have web
interfaces with thumbnail previews.
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