budgetnews.net

[jalebi]

Anyone heard anything about these guys? A friend of mine wants a usenet account, and all he needs is a fast server, retention is irrelevant to him as he says he only downloads new files, i.e. recently released stuff.

They seem pretty cheap at almost 2 euro a month for unlimted speed with 40 days of retention.

What backend provider do they use?

[JustDOSE]

test.news-service.com just use this one its free and fast has 350 days retention, but that one i wouldnt pay a year upfront on a new site what if it closes.

[zot]

Hi Jalebi. By any chance, is your "friend" the same person who has been hitting a lot of the Dutch Usenet forums in the past few months saying that this company is the perfect fit for his needs?

It seems it's always the new people who will bring up some obscure new-born company that no one has ever 'heard' about, in a post that reads more like an advertisement. ;)

You seem like a knowledgeable person, and it seems to me that someone with the knowledge of what a "back-end provider" is would hopefully know that a server carrying only 5% of the retention of a major NSP is almost certainly going to be an independent standalone server - and not a reseller using a back-end provider, which typically has up to 20-times the retention of this particular provider's 40 day retention.

The listed price of this service is 5 Euro/month, not €2 (yearly is €25, which works out to a little over €2/mo. when prepaid annually). The huge price spread (on a per-month basis) between monthly and yearly accounts would suggest to me that they might be desperate for immediate cash - which is not an unusual situation for a start-up company.

At least the website is honest that the service is over-subscribed, and therefore slow during peak hours. I would venture a guess that they do not get DMCA takedowns like the more established usenet providers are often plagued with, and this fact alone might make this company worth taking note of. (and unlike many NZB sites, they don't even list a procedure for dealing with infringement claims) The company does not appear to advertise - not counting all the mentions on usenet discussion forums by new users. ;)

[hdjunky]

i think this is just the paid version of that free server just4today since just4today links to it if you like it so much and want to pay.

[jalebi]

Hi Jalebi. By any chance, is your "friend" the same person who has been hitting a lot of the Dutch Usenet forums in the past few months saying that this company is the perfect fit for his needs?

It seems it's always the new people who will bring up some obscure new-born company that no one has ever 'heard' about, in a post that reads more like an advertisement. ;)

You seem like a knowledgeable person, and it seems to me that someone with the knowledge of what a "back-end provider" is would hopefully know that a server carrying only 5% of the retention of a major NSP is almost certainly going to be an independent standalone server - and not a reseller using a back-end provider, which typically has up to 20-times the retention of this particular provider's 40 day retention.

The listed price of this service is 5 Euro/month, not €2 (yearly is €25, which works out to a little over €2/mo. when prepaid annually). The huge price spread (on a per-month basis) between monthly and yearly accounts would suggest to me that they might be desperate for immediate cash - which is not an unusual situation for a start-up company.

At least the website is honest that the service is over-subscribed, and therefore slow during peak hours. I would venture a guess that they do not get DMCA takedowns like the more established usenet providers are often plagued with, and this fact alone might make this company worth taking note of. (and unlike many NZB sites, they don't even list a procedure for dealing with infringement claims) The company does not appear to advertise - not counting all the mentions on usenet discussion forums by new users. ;)

My friend hardly knows how to use torrents, I doubt he's the one making all the posts on Dutch forums. And secondly, I hope I wasn't giving of an air of advertising. I'm very skeptical about the company and was merely inquiring into its quality.

I was blissfully unaware that an unknown usenet provider would have the resources to maintain its own usenet server.

Thanks for the info nonetheless! :)

[zot]

It always makes me wonder whenever people come up with, what seems to me, to be highly unusual scenarios. I've yet to meet anyone who "hardly knows how to use torrents" - yet is active in downloading usenet binaries. I mean, how often does something like that happen? I'd be very surprised if any members of this or other usenet/NZB forums started downloading NZBs before they were already highly proficient in bittorrent, which anyway has a lot more content than usenet.

... But back on topic

Budgetnews charges €5 per month (US $7/month) . For about 1.5x Budgetnews' monthly price, you can get about 20x Budgetnews' retention, at several different usenet providers that offer free SSL and more connections.

Also, the website claims that speeds may be slow during peak hours. For users not bothered by slow speed, there are providers like Hitnews and XLned (w/ 300+ days retention) that offer 2.5megabit/sec speeds for €3/month (and even less when prepaid annually) and also allow account sharing -- which Budgetnews does not allow.

It seems that this provider does not offer any alternate ports. That's a careless oversight. Don't they know that there are many ISPs that throttle - or completely block- port 119? Another thing that makes no sense to me is why they limit all groups to 10 days of headers, regardless of the group size, rather than basing the limit on the number of articles. But then if I were running a server like this, I would prefer to reduce retention in the big-file groups like hdtv while increasing it in the small-file groups like the MP3 and picture groups, in order to make more efficient use of limited storage capacity. That's how most usenet providers rationed retention levels during the 1990s and early 2000s when disk capacity was very small.

In my opinion, I think that Budgetnews might be a worthwhile consideration if it cut the monthly price, which is nearly as much as A-list providers like Supernews, UNS, or Astraweb. It also should consider offering additional 3-month and 6 month terms, as I suspect that a lot of people (including myself) are not willing to gamble a full year's payment that a new company such as this will even be around a year from now.

[technovert]

I subscribed to the annual plan to try it out. Completion is good, definately less than usenetserver or astraweb but still acceptable. Downloaded 4 linux isos ;) from alt.binaries.multimedia maxing out my connection totalling about 3GB. I configured my fill server (Usenetserver from my ISP with full retention) and found that it needed to pull about 11MB off of it. So this combined with a block account would be a good cheap option if someone wants usenet cheaply. I think or the value though there are providers like cheapnews.eu, hitnews.eu and xlned that provide a better value in the budget usenet space.

I will probably keep my subscription only because of the valuable service just4today provides to the internet at large.

[Eaglenik]

Very interesting !!! Sounds a good way to support just4today too.

[JustDOSE]

sounds like just4today is giving noobs a taste so they will buy from them

[technovert]

Probably should have meantioned: Retention a few days short of 40. I found alt.binaries.multimedia (fairly large group) to have about 37 days retention with fairly good completion.

[jalebi]

It always makes me wonder whenever people come up with, what seems to me, to be highly unusual scenarios. I've yet to meet anyone who "hardly knows how to use torrents" - yet is active in downloading usenet binaries. I mean, how often does something like that happen? I'd be very surprised if any members of this or other usenet/NZB forums started downloading NZBs before they were already highly proficient in bittorrent, which anyway has a lot more content than usenet.

... But back on topic

Budgetnews charges €5 per month (US $7/month) . For about 1.5x Budgetnews' monthly price, you can get about 20x Budgetnews' retention, at several different usenet providers that offer free SSL and more connections.

Also, the website claims that speeds may be slow during peak hours. For users not bothered by slow speed, there are providers like Hitnews and XLned (w/ 300+ days retention) that offer 2.5megabit/sec speeds for €3/month (and even less when prepaid annually) and also allow account sharing -- which Budgetnews does not allow.

It seems that this provider does not offer any alternate ports. That's a careless oversight. Don't they know that there are many ISPs that throttle - or completely block- port 119? Another thing that makes no sense to me is why they limit all groups to 10 days of headers, regardless of the group size, rather than basing the limit on the number of articles. But then if I were running a server like this, I would prefer to reduce retention in the big-file groups like hdtv while increasing it in the small-file groups like the MP3 and picture groups, in order to make more efficient use of limited storage capacity. That's how most usenet providers rationed retention levels during the 1990s and early 2000s when disk capacity was very small.

In my opinion, I think that Budgetnews might be a worthwhile consideration if it cut the monthly price, which is nearly as much as A-list providers like Supernews, UNS, or Astraweb. It also should consider offering additional 3-month and 6 month terms, as I suspect that a lot of people (including myself) are not willing to gamble a full year's payment that a new company such as this will even be around a year from now.

Haha, yeah that scenario is an unlikely one, except in this case I'd probably show him how to use binaries. He'd thus skip torrentings (having never really done it) and go straight to usenet. He was just so impressed with the content and speed which I could get with usenet.


I subscribed to the annual plan to try it out. Completion is good, definately less than usenetserver or astraweb but still acceptable. Downloaded 4 linux isos ;) from alt.binaries.multimedia maxing out my connection totalling about 3GB. I configured my fill server (Usenetserver from my ISP with full retention) and found that it needed to pull about 11MB off of it. So this combined with a block account would be a good cheap option if someone wants usenet cheaply. I think or the value though there are providers like cheapnews.eu, hitnews.eu and xlned that provide a better value in the budget usenet space.

I will probably keep my subscription only because of the valuable service just4today provides to the internet at large.

Interesting, I'll tell my friend to subscribe for a month, help him out, and if it all runs well I'll recommend a yearly sub.

Thanks!

[technovert]

Interesting, I'll tell my friend to subscribe for a month, help him out, and if it all runs well I'll recommend a yearly sub.

Thanks! Don't really think there is much value in the monthly account. I think the only real value is the annual 25 EUR account combined with a ISP newservers or a block account for longer retention/fills.