Usenet-News or Usenetserver??

[MultiForce]

Thanks for all the info guys

@ stephenchow http://www.usenet-news.net/

Think that I'll do as st0ry suggested and try the 3 day trial for UNS first

I hear people talking a lot about giganews, its it really that much better then the others?? UNS appears to offer unlimited download, 10 connections, 101 retention and SSL for about $10 less a month than giganews.

A lot of people use UNS so I guess they are as good as Giganews. I use Giganews just because of their support and because I'm too lazy to change

[superfuzzy]

I bought a 10GB block of usenet-news, and so far so good! I did some research and for light usage nothing was better. The only down side is 70 days retention. This is acceptable, but Giganews and a few others have better.


I just went to check my usage at their site, logged in and found they have SSL - will try that tonight!
Another poster also mentioned in this thread.

[Windy72]

Sound advice from all really. I use usenet-news after two months I have only used 7 gig of my 300 gig account mainly because of the free easynews NL server. I download quite a lot but not enough to make paying for the monthly accounts worthwhile. Good quality block accounts for me. More NSP's should offer this along with good monthly accounts. Why don't they?

[Beck38]

What's a fill?

In 'ye olden days' (i.e. say 5+ years ago), there were only a couple of semi-fair stand-alone (non-isp) usenet servers, and they were expensive (including Giganews). Most isp servers had a retention rate of around a handfull of days, if that, especially when it came to 4-8GB dvd files, even audioCD files had a half-life of maybe a week. One had to be really on their toes to grap things, and so having a 'fills' server to plug the missing parts was pretty much required.

Of course, that's when a 20GB HD ran close to $500+; and transfer speeds averaged in the sub1Mb/s range for around $50+/month. Same bucks today gets you close to 2TB and 10Mb/s+. And server retention is at least 90+ days and rising. But most isp servers are still junk, but the commercial outfits run a fair competition with each other.

Good quality block accounts for me. More NSP's should offer this along with good monthly accounts. Why don't they?

It's kind of fallen out of favor, from an accounting standpoint it was more trouble than it was worth, with noobs screaming all the time they wanted their money back, ect. Go to the Faqs of those that do, and it goes on and on about how they won't refund on block accounts.

I've thought about dropping my GN account and going blocks only every now and again, simply because I do ton's of recodes myself, there are decent dvd-by-mail systems (Netflix and Blockbuster), and I find that most of what I get are dvd9's anyways (except for those that are non-recoded dvd5's). At some point things get a bit rediculous, once you've filled all your 'must gets' down to 'maybe gets', and the new stuff coming out isn't all that great, things slow down. Same thing happend with CD's; I get nothing but 'lossless' and code to mp3 when/if I want to (mostly for the car player). Last time I actually spent real money for burnable CD's, I can't remember; I still have 4-500+ of 24x maxells I got for 'free' with rebates.

The cost analysis has all changed radically. I've done tons of episodic dvd's and was going to start up a couple new series recently, but found that the cost for NEW on ebay was LESS than the cost of blanks and all the hassels of 'burning my own'. Good DVD9's (Verbatims) are still around $1.50 if you watch the sales, good for use on stuff that is still not dropping, for the 'good stuff'. But if you'll notice, lots of the recent episodic DVD's (Rome, Soprano's, ect.) are putting only enough episodes at HIGH bit rates that the only way to keep from recoding is to put each episode on a DVD5. Kinda rediculous. Nice quality though. But enough to look at buying the commercial discs IF the price is right; and sometimes it is.

[sm00nie]

I also tried the $3 trial at uns first to test my connection speeds and I was satisfied at reaching my max connection speed (6mbit = 750kb/s). So far its been a few weeks and I'm still reaching my max speeds. Very happy with them so far .

[zot]

Baldrick82 - you did not mention which Usenet-news account you have, but I assume you bought the unlimited monthly?

Usenet-news is an excellent provider of non-expiring blocks, with among the lowest prices and largest selection, but their recently-added unlimited monthly service at $19/month is not the cheapest. Ngroups.net is owned and run by the same people as Usenet-News, as well as both resellers of Highwinds-Media service, but Ngroups prices its unlimited at $15/month. Unlike Usenet-News, Ngroups does not offer SSL access.

For unlimited service, UNS is probably the best deal for the money right now - 101 day retention + SSL for $15/mo unlimited. But be aware that their quality has reportedly not been perfect recently. UNS runs its own server farm.

I have not used UNS, so I can't comment on their service from experience. I will say that for the two best-known block account providers - Usenet-News and Astraweb - Usenet-News has much better tech support, as it's 24/7 and always fast replies; Astraweb's tech guys, although quite competent, don't answer emails on evenings, weekends, or holidays.

Good quality block accounts for me. More NSP's should offer this along with good monthly accounts. Why don't they?

I suspect that they would rather have users paying each and every month - instead of paying one time for a non-expiring block and then nursing on it for the rest of the year. Maybe that's why Giganews dropped its block account offering.

Monthly accounts were offered by NSPs first, and anyway most companies (in any industry) tend to simply copy their competitors. For a long time, Astraweb was about the only usenet provider to buck the trend by offering any cheaply-priced non-expiring block accounts - and they built their business on it.

It was once common for many usenet pay-providers (particularly the many resellers) to charge according to the bandwidth being throttled. Many services still price their accounts this way, but it seems that few users today are interested in being throttled. Resellers, of course, generally pay for their service monthly on a per-connection/per bandwidth basis, so it was probably easier for them to craft customer accounts similarly. (or what's known as "cash flow": Since they are having to pay their back-end provider each month regardless of usage, they want to have their customers do the same with them.)

[knight76]

I'm using UNS. I max out my connection and haven't had any issues with them yet.