Wednesday, 09 April 2008, 15:08:44 EDT
Categories:
I've removed my referral link to Usenetserver.com. I do not feel comfortable recommending them anymore. Over the past year they have gone from great to infuriating. There are times when the service says you are connected too many times when you haven't even been connected for hours. The SSL server gives 403 errors while the non-SSL server returns 223. But the non-SSL server, and the SSL server, randomly sends the wrong articles!
Needless to say, I'm in the market for a new Usenet provider. I tired out Newsguy.com's free trial last night, but it was too slow. I was never able to break 200KB/s down, and the initial connection took an inordinate amount of time. The problem is, there are really only a couple of good providers. Most of them are reselling someone else's service. Specifically, most of the market is in the hands of Highwinds (of which the fairest priced providers are a part) and Giganews. UNS is owned by Highwinds. So is Newsguy. But Newsguy seemed to work a little better, if slower, because it sent the correct articles for ... (view rest)
Wednesday, 25 April 2007, 19:53:16 EDT
After writing the previous post, UsenetServer.com was shown to me. For only two dollars more than Giganews' 25GB/month service, they provide the same number of concurrent connections as Giganews, unlimited bandwidth, free SSL support, and are local to Atlanta. Oh, and they remove the X-Trace header from your posts adding just a little more anonymity. The downside? They index fewer groups and the retention is currently nineteen days fewer than Giganews. Personally, I think it is a good tradeoff for the money. I'm quite positive that UsenetServer indexes any group I could ever want to read, and if they don't, they will add it if requested.
So, I've replaced the Giganews button with a UsenetSever button and removed the previous referral links. If you were considering usenet access after my previous post, b ... (view rest)
Monday, 16 April 2007, 10:05:03 EDT
First, I would like to express my appreciation for all the words of comfort everyone has expressed to me; via this site and other methods. I don't know what to say other than thank you.
Moving on, I added another button to the list of buttons. As with the Bluehost button, the Giganews one puts a little money in my pocket if you sign up for their service through my links. With Giganews, I don't see any money unless you stay with them for ninety days. I don't really expect to ever get anything out of putting the link up, but it's worth a shot, I suppose.
Until recently, I've been using BitTorrent (BT) to download missed episodes of television shows. BT is really nice when the torrent is well seeded, but that hardly ever happens. That, combined with limited peer-to-peer traffic on campus, makes for some really long downloads. I'm talking about days, not hours. I got sick of it, knowing that the files I want would be available on the Usenet. In days of old, ISPs and major universities provided Usenet access. Nowadays, most ISPs write off Usenet services as low priority since most of their users don't even know what it is. Speedfactory, for example, use to provide access but it was slow and had horrible data retention. They flirted with better Usenet service for a while, but then dropped it altogether. That left me without Usenet access at home. Since CSU isn't a very large university, it has never provided Usenet access to its students (at least, not that I am aware). So I broke down and signed up for a Giganews account.
I must say, I'm impressed. Their servers are really fast, and the ten simultaneous connections is awesome. I quickly burned through my three day free trial and activated the actual account. I also like how the trial data limits don't affect the first month's service. However, I think that is going to be moot in my case. I'm currently signed up for the 25GB/month service; my next service period doesn't start until 9 May and I've already hit 11GB. I think I'm going to be upgrading my account to unlimited service soon. I haven't decided, though. The price may be too much for me right now; I'll have to see if I run out of bandwidth before the ninth and then make my decision.
Another thing that has me excited about newsgroup access again is a new file format — NZB. Instead of having to download days worth of headers, an NZB file can be used to tell your newsreader what files you wish to download. It is real ... (view rest)