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Commercial NNTP Gateway Recommendations?
plazman30 asks: "I am a customer of comcast.net, which provides usenet access through Giganews, but they cap downloads at 1 GB. Giganews will allow greater access for a monthly fee, but the amount of download you get is based on how much you pay. I am interested in getting usenet access greater than 1 GB and am willing to pay for it, but I want to get the best value for my dollar. I was wondering what slashdot users that pay for usenet access are using."
supernews. Basic Monthly is 6 gigs @ 13.95 upto 36 gigs a month at $59.95. I've never maxed out that 6 gigs, but I'm also not snarfing down passive amounts of porn. Cough cough.
I have never tried My binaries but they seem to be the cheapest
with 1.5 GB/day for a $10 per month fee.
Seriously, go with Easynews. There are several reasons:
1) Article retention is about 15 days in binaries on NNTP, and completion of multi-part binaries is in my experience 100% except when people post from really really poor servers which don't propagate well at all. Non-binaries retention is of course several months.
2) NNTP access is uncensored. Many providers won't offer uncensored NNTP access at all, "banning" groups with controversial content from their servers. While I don't, for example, download illegal binaries from naughty groups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and alt.binaries.pictures.erotia.underage-admirers , I have read and posted text to those groups when I was researching the types of people involved in kinderporn for a writing project, and made a few friends in those parts. (Nice guys...they just have different taste in pr0n than most of us...) I also am against censorship in all forms; arresting people for posting illegal things is fine, but don't try to censor the speech pre-emptively. I wouldn't support an NNTP provider who chose to censor their feed.
3) They *do* have a download limit, but it's $9.95 for every 6 GB and you can purchase another 6 GB for another $9.95 at any time. That's reasonable, and while you'll find "uncapped" access, it's always at a premium rate and the service just isn't as good as Easynews--I can pull an NNTP feed from Easynews at my cable's full speed, unlike when I've tried other services, and the completion is phenomenal.
4) Easynews also offers an interesting twist--in addition to standard NNTP access with 15 day retention in binaries, you also get Web-based access with a whopping 38-42 day retention in binaries. I actually find it easier to use the Web interface if I'm looking for something specific in a group I don't typically read. And the 40 day retention is amazing.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
I'm also a Comcast customer and have chosen to go with Giganews as a commercial news service. Their retention is nice and long (about 2 weeks on average) and the completeness I've seen it perfect. Its not cheap, but they provide a great news feed. Here is a page with useful reviews of premium usenet providers if you want to do a little homework before you decide.
$8.95 per month. No caps. No throttling. No limit on number of simultaneous connections. Seems to have pretty damned good retention, and I've managed speeds up to 500k/sec from their servers.
Read my stuff.