apocryph.org Notes to my future self

Just got EasyNews account; like it

I finally grew weary of my ISPs mizerly 1GB USENET download limit, so I started shopping around for a dedicated USENET provider. The AnchorDudes Usenet Newsserver FAQ was helpful in narrowing the field to two contenders:

• GigaNews
• Easynews

GUBA was somewhat appealing, except it only does video and images now; if I wanted pr0n, GUBA would def be the way to go.

At any rate, I settled upon Easynews, both because they are cheaper ($10/mo for 20GB/mo, plus an additional 4GB if you donate compute time to grid.org), and because they are more established, have absurd retention rates, and a global newsgroup search function.

So far, the results have been favorable. The EasyNews web interface is tres retro; first generation web, and as hard to use as that implies. They provide NNTP servers as well, of course, but I’ve spent the last decade searching for a non-shitty NNTP client and have yet to find one.

The only other remark I can make about EasyNews is that their servers are absurdly fast. Downloading a zip archive containing the binaries from a collection of posts, about 230MB total, averaged 881K/s (that’s capital K, kilobytes) from bonzo, who’s hard-wired with 100 megabit Ethernet to multiple redundant OC-42 pipes at CI Host’s DFW facility. I’ve never seen files come down that fast across the Internet; it’s obscene it’s so fast.