Astraweb is notably absent from your list. (lots of Astraweb users here!) Astraweb's completion is much better than Highwinds/Usenetserver, and also offers block accounts. Astraweb will give a refund if you cancel within (I think) 24 hours. Supernews (Giganews w/capped 800 day retention) is also a worthy mention. Also Gebruikhet.net is a German XS-News reseller that sells block accounts.
regarding Megabitz: that front-page "(Sh)October special" was put up in October 2007 or 2008 -- and the website has never been updated since then. Megabitz was heavily promoted back then, offered some great specials, and lot of people paid for long-term accounts, only to find the service stopped working --for months-- and tech support stopped answering questions. Read the horror stories on the Slyck forum. I assume you are aware that all "independent" providers are basically just reselling access to one of the (approximately dozen or so) major usenet providers' server farms. Eweka is owned by Highwinds. I think that Megabitz resold Highwinds and Usenet Monster resold Readnews -- so if that's still the case then that should put their retention in the 1000-day range, regardless of what the website might say.
I did some comparisons of server completion over the last few months, and found that Highwinds was much worse than both Readnews and Astraweb. Highwinds completion on newer (<400 day old) files was generally perfect but older (500+day) files was consistently poor, around 98% - 99% completion rate. Header retention was sometimes under a hundred days - with enormous gaps - but I can't say for sure if it was Highwinds fault or a newsreader glitch. (I only discovered this as my account was about to expire)
However, a lot of big files like movies are posted with around 5% par files, so having 1% or 2% incomplete is generally fixable with par2 files. Even if a file was posted with no pars, you can still insure perfect completion by setting up a fill server (or two) in your usenet client since -barring a posting error- it's unlikely that two unrelated NSP servers (such UNS and Blocknews) would both be missing the same segment.
You don't even need to download the file to check completion - just "ping" for the articles. I use NZB Download Checker, but there are many other applications that will check completion without downloading anything.
I used to keep block accounts from Highwinds, Readnews, and Astraweb, but Highwinds completion has been so bad this year that I have not bothered to buy any HW block accts lately.
I've posted some Highwinds completion reports here:
Code:
http://filesharingtalk.com/threads/431428-Highwinds-and-their-piss-poor-completion
http://filesharingtalk.com/threads/432538-Highwinds-retention-improves-completion-gets-worse
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