Many ISPs provide some type of Usenet access with your account. For instance, I use Comcast, and they give me a 1GB/month account through Giganews, which I access at nntp://newsgroups.comcast.net. You may think a Gig sounds like a lot to download, but consider that a 30 minute show well compressed into XviD is usually around 350MB. That gives you just less than two shows a month to download (my account my be more than that, but it's only marginally more).
The things to consider when choosing a usenet provider are:
- Retention: How long after someone posts something to usenet can you retrieve it through this service.
- Connection speed: Can you connect to this server at your internet connection's full capacity?
- Completion: Once you find what you want to download, will this provider have the whole thing or just parts of it?
There are quite a few different providers out there. I'll discuss only the most popular few.
I use Newshosting and have been quite happy with them for several years. Their website is simple, and my experience with them has been quite good. I would guess that their downtime averages only a few hours a year. Now for the three things I mentioned above:
- They have good retention (I get around 75 days with a $14.95/mo account)
- I have a 6Mbps connection and I get that speed (sometimes with spikes much higher) consistently.
- I have not had any problems with this at all, when posts are less than 60 days old or so.
There are three plans with Newshosting: For $10/month you get what they call NH10: 10GB per month with advertised 70+ day retention. For $14.95/month (NH45) you get unlimited downloads, advertised 45 day retention with a limit of 8 concurrent connections. I have this type of account and I'm pretty sure the 45 day retention limit is only in headers - if you get an NZB file that's older than that, you can still get what it refers to (I've always been able to). Finally, for $19.95/month you get the whole shebang - advertised 70+ day retention, unlimited downloads and unlimited concurrent connections (though I have a hard time imagining how more than 8 connectios would be useful).
Again, I've been thrilled with newshosting and would absolutely recommend them to anyone looking for a usenet provider. To sign up, click here.
Another provider that I've used and liked is Easynews. They might be the most popular provider out there. They have similar statistics to newshosting in the three categories I mentioned, except that their retention is less. From their site: "Retention is one to two weeks in all binary groups, three or more in heavy binary groups." For downloading TV shows, and for people who keep on top of things, this shouldn't be a problem. I remember getting much better retention than that from them. I'm guessing they advertise low retention because they are legally bound to provide at least what they advertise.
One significant difference from Newshosting to Easynews is the type of account you can have. Easynews does not appear to have an unlimited account. In stead, they offer one account type, and that is as follows: $9.95 gets you either 20GB of downloads or 1 month of service, whichever comes first. Then if/when you exceed the 20GB limit, they charge the $9.95 again and your month/download limit starts over. They also explain that NNTP downloads are discounted by 25%. This requires some explanation...
From easynews, you can download directly from their website, over http, or you can connect with a news browser (this is essentially what SABnzbd is). Apparently with a news browser there is a bit of overhead, causing what you've downloaded to be higher than what you've gotten. Thus Easynews gives the discount I mentioned. So If all you use is NNTP through them, you should be able to get 26.66GB downloaded per $9.95.
But wait! There's still more to consider... If you use your computer on the World Computing Grid (a distributed computing program) for at least 15 days/month, you can get 2 free GB of downloads. Also, there is a survey you can take to earn another 2 free GB.
Easynews prides themselves on connection flexibility and privacy. They have many different routes you can use to get to their servers, and they support the NNTPS protocol (secure NNTP) as well as HTTPS. Furthermore, they advertise that they don't log downloads and when you post to usenet (another discussion entirely) they remove any possibly identifying headers. If privacy/anonymity are important to you, Easynews may just be the way to go.
After reading up on them, it is apparent that they have many more features than Newshosting. The main advantage Newshosting has over them is the unlimited download accounts. If you'd like to sign up for Easynews, click here.
The last provider that I'll be discussing here is Giganews. However, it's quite late already, and that post will have to wait for another time.
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