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Premium News Service Providers
GigaNews
Giganews is a great service provider if you're looking
for multipart binary completion and completion in the text newsgroups.
They have multiple levels of download caps that you can purchase to
fit your monthly "download budget". They also offer automatic
account recycling so if you hit your limit for the month, you can start
a new month of service earlier than usual. For example, if your billing
day is normally the 3rd of each month, and you hit your limit on the
19th, and you have account recycling activated, your account will renew
itself on the 19th, and your new billing day for each month will be
the 19th. You can also elect to recycle your account manually by logging
in to the web-based control panel for your account. Binary retention
is quite good at just over two weeks for multiparts and over a month
for single part binaries.
Newsguy
I'm not a subscriber to Newsguy yet, but they do have
one interesting concept: Newsguy Groups. You can create a free account
and create your own newsgroup under the newsguy.* domain. It appears
as though users are free to create their newsgroup name any way they
see fit, so you'll find a few mispelled words and poorly constructed
hierarchies, but when you let the ignorant masses have free reign over
a hierarchy, I suppose these annoyances must be expected. Just look
at the alt.* hierarchy. It's a disaster area, what with multiple newsgroups
covering a single topic. If all the groups were combined, the one single
group would be far more useful than a bunch of scarecly used groups.
Newscene
I don't know much about Newscene, so I'll save this
space for when I do know something.
Usenetserver
Ditto for Usenetserver.
Newsfeeds
Newsfeeds is an interesting service. They seem to
like advertising the fact that they have multiple servers. They have
one for MP3's, one for text, one for videos, one for images, one for
this and one for that. They even have an anonymous posting server you
can use which will strip all the tracking info from your message's headers,
but it also strips your moniker. If you don't mind being known as "Anonymous"
then go ahead and post through it. As for all the different servers,
I personally like having all my stuff on one server, and those who use
Forte Agent as a newsreader would probably agree with me on that. The
more money you give to Newsfeeds, the more servers you can access.
Altopia
I have never used Altopia. I do use their test server
to access the altopia support group. But in the alt.binaries.news-server-comparison
newsgroup, not many people have good things to say about Altopia these
days. They say it used to be the shit, but nowadays retention sucks,
completion sucks, and speed sucks, if you can even get connected. And
to add insult to misery, they're the most expensive news server I've
seen to date. Still, if you multiplex your servers and you're a glutton
for a buttload of newsgroups in your active list, whether they're actually
used or not, and if you have the extra money to throw away, grabbing
the least expensive subscription to Altopia might not be a bad idea.
They claim to have over 100,000 newsgroups. Newsfeeds has about 98,000
on their text server and about 3,000 on their Goliath binary server.
But the last time I checked Altopia's active list, I wasn't even able
to get it to load. It appears as though the guy running the operation
might be taking a permanent vacation. He's surely raked in a few million
off what he charges for usenet service. Perhaps when he needs money
again, he'll come in and install some upgrades.
Easynews
I like Easynews. It has long retention in the text
groups, and respectable retention in binary groups. The newsgroup alt.binaries.news-server-comparison
had articles that were twenty months old! Call me crazy, but I think
that's taking retention a little too far. I think the furthest back
a server should go is about two, maybe three months. If you're on dialup,
trying to download 140,000 headers in an active newsgroup can take forever.
Heck, it even takes quite a while on broadband, considering. What these
news providers should do is have news.provider.com set up for standard
access, then have archive.provider.com set up to store articles that
are older than three months, perhaps up to about a year old. After that,
leave it up to Google to handle
the archives. It's what they do best.
Supernews
I don't know much about Supernews, so I'll save this
for a time when I do know something about them.
Ultra
Feed
This appears to be a new server on the block. Users
are saying they're getting better at retention and speed. We'll see.
NewsReader.Com
I don't know much about this service. Last time I
checked (2/15/2003) they were offering 50-gigabytes per month for only
$9.95. What their retention and completion are like is something you'll
have to ask around about, or try them out yourself. You'll have to read
their website to find out more.
NewsHosting
Yet another server I know little about. But it's there
for the picking.
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