Block Accounts

[Windy72]

i have been usenet news the retention rate isn´t the greatest but you can´t beat those prices

Had some issues of late with usenet-news.net. Slow connection slow propergation on posts. The retention is not 100 days as the site suggest. On some large groups the post has fallen off after 50 days. But yes they are the best on price.

[zot]

Astraweb has the best retention of any block account I know of. 125+ days via NZBs. Astraweb owns their own server farm, unlike Usenet-News and many of the rest of the hundreds of Usenet "providers" that are just resellers that connect you to the same Highwinds/UNS back-end servers.

Any retention issues on one provider (reseller) are therefore going to be duplicated on many others. When shopping for a NSP, I always find out what company they are using for their back-end servers. Commonly it is Highwinds owned.

NEWSGROUPDIRECT ... The cheapest block 50 and 100 accounts

Let's compare NewsgroupDirect.com with Usenet-News.net:

The 50 GB block costs the same ($15) on both Usenet-News and NewsgroupDirect
The 100GB block is $1 less at NewsgroupDirect.

The main difference is that NewsgroupDirect gives free headers, while Usenet-News no longer does, instead giving everyone an extra 10% of download volume (so when you buy a 100 GB account at Usenet-News you actually get 110 GB of download). So for someone who uses NZB sites instead of downloading headers (ie - most of us) Usenet-News comes out cheaper than NewsgroupDirect on all accounts.

As I mentioned a few posts back, news4u2.com has the cheapest 100GB block (that I know about) at $20. I just found out that they appear to use the same back-end servers as Usenet.com (which is Newsfeeds.com server farm) which makes me wonder if they are now blocking all MP3 groups like Usenet.com (which was sued recently)