News server question

[PITBULL50]

I have switched from Charter to Comcast and now need a news server (Host). Can anyone offer a Host name that I can use with Grabit. Thank you in advance for any help with this.

[hdjunky]

Are you prepared to pay for access? There are plenty of options out there if you are fine with paying. If you will still be trying to go the free route, I am not sure you will get great results, unless that is, you use text groups only!

If you want low cost (who doesn't right?), check out Usenetnow where you can pay anywheres from 8 bucks a month right now up to 12 bucks depending on if you pay ahead of time, some of the accounts you do not have to subscribe to just to get the special prices. They also have weekly accounts too So if you are not a heavy downloader you can save your downloads up and then just buy a week at a time here and there.

Astraweb is another favorite of some here...$11 a month or 96 bucks for the year if you want to pony up that much now.

Block accounts may be a good option, but you did not say how much you typically download per month now. usenet-news.net sells them and so does blocknews.net (bit better prices)...Good thing about block accounts is, they do not expire and you just buy more when you have used it up.

[Beck38]

Hard to beat Astraweb on price/performance.

BUT you're on a cable system which means you have hard/soft/whoknows data transfer limits, so unless you want to run the risk of getting 'cut off' (or getting a nasty letter to 'cease and desist'), and depending on your transfer amounts, you may find the block accounts the way to go (again, Astra is pretty cheap and unlike others, don't limit the block accounts retainability i.e., the entire database is downloadable).

I run 24/7 on Astraweb with DSL, 3Mb/s. That works our to about 20GB/Day, or 300GB/Month. After about one day of that on Comcast where I live, my account would be shut off, maybe permanently.

[rippinitup4fun]

Comcast imposes a 250 gig a month download limit.. I believe if you go over it they will warn you 1 time, go over again they cut your service. So if you are a very heavy downloader be careful and install a bandwidth monitor or somehow monitor how much you are grabbing each month. But to be honest that is a fair amount I mean you can go over that relatively easily if you for instance grab a lot of full blu-ray, hell that would be over with just 5 full blu-rays. But if you are just the casual HD x264 encode or XviD downloader you should have no problems staying under the limit. Comcast , at least when I had them offered free usenet but only 2 gigs a month download quota.

So as others said be prepared to pay. Astraweb is the way to go...just my 2 cents.