Cheapest ever? $5.00 Unlimited Usenet from Thundernews

[nobrumski]

Funny to see this thread pop up, since my friends all got our Black Friday plans cancelled on us recently. They just stopped charging us and deleted our accounts. When we emailed support we were all told we were flagged for abuse. Apparently using the service is grounds for abuse. For me it was a backup server and rarely used. I just noticed my logins failed.

[Wolfenstein]

Although a NSP can offer a super-low price by using a cheap, low retention server, that is not the case here. As a Highwinds reseller, Thundernews is paying the same price for its feed as other Highwinds resellers. So how can they offer it for half the price as the next closest competitor who is selling what is essentially an identical service?

The fact is, they can't -- at least not unless they find a way to reduce the average cost (usage) per person. That's just basic economics.

These usenet "fantastic deals" are nothing new. Does anyone remember a usenet provider called 100 Proof News? They made a name for themselves a few years ago by offering the cheapest "unlimited" price in the business -- and then throttling or kicking out all customers who dared to exceed their secret monthly limit. They could keep prices very cheap because only the lowest-usage customers remained on their service (the rest quit in disgust). Not a recommended long-term business strategy, as demonstrated by the fact that 100 Proof News is no longer around.

Anyway, ThunderNews is the same company as NewsDemon, which in the past many users on its cheapest "unlimited" plan have accused of throttling their speed.

I would encourage everyone to jump on this "too good to be true" $5/month "unlimited" plan, and then download as much as you possibly can your first month. Then let us know how many gigs you were able to download before the throttle kicks in and your speed slows to a crawl.

seen this many times with highwinds resellers and reported many times by ISP's members who get lumbered with highwinds NG's. Even seen it when highwinds took over other NSP's services. Often it was shite from the day of transfer, a few days here and there where it improved briefly, then settled on a service with low speed, poor retention and shite completeness.
I see the deal has now ended - don't worry folks, you won't be missing anything unless you wanted massive downloads of recent stuff for a short period, and hits from your decent service to complete them. Is it really worth the hassle?

Spend 2 hours a month stacking shelves at your local supermarket on minimum wage instead of hours p'ing about with these and you could pay for a good service.