Best usenet provider?

[Chu]

Hello all. For almost a year now I have been using airnews.net as my usenet provider. Up to about 2 months ago, no missing parts, 1-2 week retention on the huge binary groups, and you paid for how much bandwith you wanted, not by how much you download. I was paying $15/mo for 30KB/s, and was downloading many gigs a week.

Well, about a month ago, all of a sudden airnews stopped getting all the binaries. It's not that there are incomplete sections -- it's that some things come through 100%, and everything else comes through 0%.

Long story short, it is time to hunt down a new news provider, but no matter how hard I look, I *CANNOT* find another one that will let me pay for how much bandwith I want to use. Almost every usenet provider I see wants you to pay per gig you download. Is there anyone out there who knows a great usenet provider that prices by bandwith, not by quantity?

-Chu

 

[GagHalfrunt]

I don't know of any that allow you to pay as you go, they all just give you a set limit and you pay for overages, but you don't get rebates on any unused portions of your quota. It's got to be that way though as prices are worked on averages. They expect half the people to use less than half their quota. Any company that billed everyone for EXACTLY what they used would be too expensive for 50% of their customers. The best way to deal with premium usenet providers is to make sure you're using a good binary downloader with true multi-server capability. That way you can place the bulk of the downloading work on your ISP server and use the premium server just to fill in the missing segments on files that are incomplete on your ISP. That way, you might only be grabbing a single 300k segment from the premium server rather than needing to get an entire 15 megabyte file. That makes it really easy to stay under your download limits, so you can get a cheap plan and not worry too much about blowing past your quota. I use Newsguy, you're allowed 500megs a day, so 15GB a month if you use your daily quota to the max every day, but since I only use them to fill in missing segments from my ISP I never even approach that. They're good for file completion, speed is poor and retention is about 3-4 days in the really busy groups. A lot of people like EasyNews, they have great completion and the best retention around, as much as 30-40 days even in the busiest binary groups with many months retention in text groups. They offer I think 6GB per month.

How much do you expect to pay? Do you know how much you download in an average month, both total and from the premium server only? That info would really help in finding you a company that meets your needs. If you download only a very small amount you might be able to find a pay-as-you-go plan, but if you download a lot you're definitely better off with a basic quota system like almost everyone offers.

 

[bsobel]

I'm using Airnews also, but I'm tempting to try 100proofnews. Heard anything good/bad about them?

Bill

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Originally posted by: bsobel
I'm using Airnews also, but I'm tempting to try 100proofnews. Heard anything good/bad about them?

Bill

Be afraid of anyone offering "unlimited" anything. Do you expect this company to keep buying new digital lines to feed their customers sucking up 30 gigs a day for their $8.95 a month? That's not going to happen. The premium news servers went from "all you can eat" to metered downloads because people were using too much bandwidth. That place is either going to be out of business in a month or is going to change their policies to get into line with what everyone else is offering. If they're even consideribg unlimited downloads it proves that they don't have the slightest idea of what they're doing. It's probably a couple of kids in their parents basement reselling somebody elses newsfeeds. Save your money and buy the Brooklyn Bridge or some nice ocean-front property in Nebraska.

 

[Chu]

>>

I don't know of any that allow you to pay as you go, they all just give you a set limit and you pay for overages, but you don't get rebates on any unused portions of your quota. It's got to be that way though as prices are worked on averages. They expect half the people to use less than half their quota. Any company that billed everyone for EXACTLY what they used would be too expensive for 50% of their customers. The best way to deal with premium usenet providers is to make sure you're using a good binary downloader with true multi-server capability. That way you can place the bulk of the downloading work on your ISP server and use the premium server just to fill in the missing segments on files that are incomplete on your ISP. That way, you might only be grabbing a single 300k segment from the premium server rather than needing to get an entire 15 megabyte file. That makes it really easy to stay under your download limits, so you can get a cheap plan and not worry too much about blowing past your quota. I use Newsguy, you're allowed 500megs a day, so 15GB a month if you use your daily quota to the max every day, but since I only use them to fill in missing segments from my ISP I never even approach that. They're good for file completion, speed is poor and retention is about 3-4 days in the really busy groups. A lot of people like EasyNews, they have great completion and the best retention around, as much as 30-40 days even in the busiest binary groups with many months retention in text groups. They offer I think 6GB per month.

How much do you expect to pay? Do you know how much you download in an average month, both total and from the premium server only? That info would really help in finding you a company that meets your needs. If you download only a very small amount you might be able to find a pay-as-you-go plan, but if you download a lot you're definitely better off with a basic quota system like almost everyone offers.

<<

My ISP doesn't provide usenet. Hense the reason I need a seperate server. As for "they all just give you a set limit and you pay for overages," if you read my first article you would note that Airnews didn't.

I'm essentially looking for another service like Airnews in their pricing structure. It was essentially this. For $15/mo, you get unlimited access to our newserver. The catch is you can only download at 32KB/s. If you download for 4 weeks streight at 32KB/s, that's fine. If you are just browing text groups, well, your overpaying by an order of magnitude, but that's fine as well. If you want more then 32KB, move up to the next level ($30 for 50KB I believe).

This was perfect for me, and is still perfect for me. Airnews is still 100% in my book when it comes to access (I've never seen their servers down), however for some reason they've stopped getting all the binaries. Not missing parts mind you -- some things just do not show up at all, even though I know they should be there from others. One example -- the Inuyasha Movie (an anime) was posted to a.b.a a couple months ago. I know a lot of people who did grab it then, but it never appeared on Airnews. I wish I knew why :\

-Chu

 

[Chu]

I agree 100% with GagHalfrunt about 'unlimited' anything, but usually if you can get there early you can profit before the ship starts sinking. I am tempted to sign up for 1 month via Money Order and see how it is . . .

-Chu

P.S., I notice they strongly try to get you to use their custom news reader. Maybe this is how they can get away with 'unlimited,' i.e. their software makes queing almost impossible. They do say you can use forte agent, however from the lightness of the faq I wouldn't be surprised if they made this option very finecky/hard.