budgetnews.net

[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.