Hello,
I've been an Easynews.com member for almost a year now, and have yet
to find a better service. The main criteria for evaluating a news
provider (as per Forte Agent's survey linked below) are:
"
1)Performance: higher throughput and availability.
2)Completeness: having all the newsgroups and all the posted messages
for those groups.
3)Retention: having weeks of history for binary groups and months of
history for text groups.
"
And eventhough Easynews.com commands only 13.9% of the market, their
rating is the highest (99%) as scored by an independent review website
(linked below) for the criteria mentioned and for the following...
Easynews.com, goes one further by providing convenience. Easynews.com
have something which its competitors just don't have, or are working
hard at providing, and this is their web interface. They provide a
global search function which is invaluable for finding certain parts
missing that you may need to finish a set, and can search their entire
news server (over 39,228 groups) for files using one webpage (i.e. you
can search files in alt.binaries.multimedia,
alt.binaries.multimedia.repost, and alt.binaries.vcd.repost
simultaneously).
Another big part of their web interface are their web queues. They
allow you to queue up to 500 files (1 gig) for download, automatically
collecting, and zipping them into one easy file for transfer. All you
have to do is check which files you want added to the queue, and click
"add to queue". This point and click make it easy to grab multiple
files and coupled with their global search fuction, it's the easiest
I've found using any provider to date.
Their main focus is on customer service though, and this is apparent
in the many ways they cater to their customer. Even before becoming a
customer, they offer a bandwidth testing utility to gauge the
performance you can expect from Easynews.com here.
http://www.easynews.com/trace.phtml
Please keep in mind that this is the bare minimum, because once you
become a member, you have the ability at any time to reroute all
traffic through any one of their many backbones, here is a list:
BGP -- default
OC12-SPRINTLINK.NET
OC12-ALTER.NET
OC12-GBLX.NET
OC3-INET-QWEST.NET
GIGE-1-LEVEL3.NET
GIGE-2-IP-ATT.NET
GIGE-2-LEVEL3.NET
GIGE-1-IP-ATT.NET
They do a per-backbone speed test to tell you which backbone is
fastest for you, and leave it up to you to decide.
As well as speed measurement and selection, they keep the customer
updated on every happening at Easynews.com headquarters, posting their
system status and scheduled and unscheduled downtimes here:
http://www.easynews.com/announce.phtml
Any downtimes that I've seen have been fixed within a couple hours and
are far/few between.
Easynews.com is also world-conscious. They allow you a way to get free
gigs per month for download (their pricing $10.00 for every 30 days or
6 gigabytes) by helping the search to find a cure for cancer. If you
download the distributed client and help work on finding a cure for
cancer, they will give you one free gigabyte of download for every 15
days of worktime. So if you have just one computer running it you can
amass another 2 gigs for free every month, helping out your fellow
man. They're just giving away bandwidth in hopes that they can get
people to help find a cure.
http://www.easynews.com/cancer/
As the infintely wise LeVar Burton said on "Reading Rainbow", "...but
don't take my word for it!" If all of my testimony and evidence is not
enough to convince you that this is the best news provider, they offer
a 3 day 1 gigabyte FREE trial and you can test out all the fuctions
that I mentioned for yourself. The webpage for that is here:
https://www.easynews.com/trial/trial.phtml
I hope that I've helped you decide that Easynews.com is the best news
provider (that I've used at least and I've used approximately 5-6
different providers), feel free to ask me any other questions you may
have about this service.
Search Strategy:
best newsgroup providers on google:
://www.google.com/search?q=best+newsgroup+providers
Additional Links:
Forte Agent's premium news service survey:
http://www.forteinc.com/survey/survey.php?id=newsservice.php
smr-usenet's review listings:
http://www.smr-usenet.com/review/
smr-usenet's review scoring criteria:
http://www.smr-usenet.com/review/scoring.shtml
smr-usenet's review of Easynews.com:
http://www.smr-usenet.com/review/easynews.shtml
Thank you for the opportunity to answer your question, if you require
more information, please clarify the question, or if you find this
answer satisfactory, please feel free to rate it. Thank you!
skermit-ga |
,
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