fill-server
Without a for-pay fill-server as backup, it can be very frustrating trying to download using just your ISP server, if it's the kind that has only has a few days retention and a lot of incompletes.
If you don't want to pay the cost of a monthly account, you can get a "block account" to supplement your ISP news server. Usenet providers like Astraweb http://news.astraweb.com and Usenet-News http://usenet-news.net sell gigabyte blocks of download that never expire, so you can pay just once and use it up gradually, as long as it takes, whenever you need a few files every now and then that are missing from your ISP news server.
In a lot of binary news clients, you can set up the servers as a primary and secondary, which means that it will first try to download from your free ISP server, then for any part that is not there, it will then automatically try to download that missing file from your paid block account.
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