Our binary retention continues to climb into the stratosphere. We have zoomed past 800 days and are currently around 810 days and growing – that’s OVER 2 YEARS of articles. At a lowball average of 1.5 TB/day for the usenet feed, that means that our servers house an astounding 1.2 petabytes of data.
We’re ringing in the New Year at NewsgroupDirect. We’re having a special limited-time 50%-off sale on all of our block usenet accounts. Take this opportunity to stock up on your block accounts at this greatly reduced rate. The sale runs from Dec. 30, 2010 until Jan. 5, 2011 at 11:59PM EST. Here is the complete pricing list for our blocks during the sale:
New users can purchase a 50 GB block for $7.50. Once you’re a member you’ll be able to choose from the full assortment of block plans that we offer. Current customers can just login to our website and choose the Add Block option to purchase.
We wanted to thank all of our customers for a great year by giving you another shot at great savings. We look forward to a great 2011 with you!
Our block accounts are a simplified way to access usenet. There is no monthly subscription; you simply pay as you go. We offer a few different sizes for block accounts – the more you purchase the cheaper it is. Our blocks never expire, so you don’t have to worry about using your bandwidth or losing it.
Please Note: Existing coupons will not work during the sale. All block purchases will be made at the price listed on the website. Monthly subscription accounts will continue to bill as usual.
We’re pulling out all the stops this year for our Black Friday special. Each year we raise the bar, and this year we’ve outdone ourselves yet again. We’re selling our famous unlimited usenet accounts for $8/month (a 60% discount off our regular price)! That’s $8/month for life, not an introductory rate. Signup now at NewsgroupDirect.com/signup. You get all of the features of our unlimited accounts:
We will also give away an Apple iPad to one new customer who signs up for the $8 unlimited plan.
The deal runs from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, so act quickly. Signup now at NewsgroupDirect.com/signup.
The Fine Print
Offer is available only to new customers. Current customers are not eligible for this sale price. There is no free trial available with this offer. Offer is available from 12AM November 26, 2010 until 12AM November 30, 2010. The iPad model is the 16 GB Wi-Fi version and will be shipped 4-6 weeks after contest end. iPad is a trademark of Apple Inc. iPad giveaway is available only for customers in the United States and Canada.
Just a quick retention update. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve zoomed past another milestone. We’re now offering over 700 days of binary retention. Our text group retention continues to push the envelope at over 1400 days.
We’re known for having some of the best block usenet plans in the industry, but there are several reasons that make monthly subscription plans, particularly our legendary unlimited plan, attractive options as well.
1. Peace of Mind
With an unlimited plan you don’t have to worry about how much bandwidth you have left. You can always rest assured in knowing that you will have bandwidth available to use, no matter how long it’s been since you’ve been to our website.
2. Predictable Monthly Bill
Block accounts are inconsistent because you may use a block quicker than you did the last block, or you may buy a bigger block than you have before. Unlimited accounts are consistent; you’ll pay the same amount month to month and you’ll always know when your payment is coming up.
3. Unlimited Usenet is Awesome
What else can you say… unlimited usenet is just awesome.
4. NGD Invites
Give your friends free usenet access with an NGD Invite. Invites are useful for giving someone an introduction to usenet with a completely free account. You can give an invite by logging into your usenet account and entering the email address of the user in the invite box.
5. Online Storage Through StorageNinja
StorageNinja is NewsgroupDirect’s preferred online storage provider. NGD Unlimited account holders get a free 30 GB storage account, which is extremely useful for backing up your most critical files.
Like most everything else now, usenet has gone mobile. There are various usenet mobile apps available depending on what type of mobile device you have. Mobile devices are usually only fast enough to handle text newsgroups at this point, so the functionality is still somewhat limited compared to your home computer, but it’s a start. Here are some of our favorite mobile usenet apps.
Newstap is the original mobile usenet app. For $3.99 you get the universal app, which works on both iPhone and iPad. There is also a Newstap Lite version for free.
PhoNews is a new iPhone usenet client. It has a very nice interface and a lot of potential for future development.
Mews – Windows Mobile – FreeMews is a great looking alternative for Windows Mobile users. It’s freeware, so give it a try.
Nzb Mobile is a ssl-enabled, nzb-compatible reader for Windows Mobile. It’s pretty costly at $14.95, but it may be worth it if you need the features it provides.
Similar to Nzb Mobile, Newzdroid offer nzb management for Android Users.
Do you have any other favorite mobile newsreaders? List them in the comments section.
We did this a couple of months ago and had an overwhelming response, so we’ve decided to have another 50% off sale on our block accounts. We want to thank all of you who made so many purchases by giving you another opportunity to take advantage of these great savings. We’ve also added more block plans to our pricing page, so new users can have more block purchasing options than before. Here is a rundown of the prices for all of the block accounts that we are offering.
The sale prices are available to everyone, new customers and current customers. Current block account customers can take advantage by logging into your account and choosing the option to add a block. New customers can simply choose the block amount that they want to purchase during the signup process. And remember, you can buy as many blocks as you want. So you can certainly stock up on your block accounts if you make frequent block purchases. The sale runs from 8 PM EST on November 9 until 12AM EST on November 19.
Our block accounts are a simplified way to access usenet. There is no monthly subscription; you simply pay as you go. We offer a few different sizes for block accounts – the more you purchase the cheaper it is. Our blocks never expire, so you don’t have to worry about using your bandwidth or losing it.
Please Note: Existing coupons will not work during the sale. All block purchases will be made at the price listed on the website. Monthly subscription accounts will continue to bill as usual.
Retention is one of the most important features for a usenet provider. Simply put, retention is the number of usenet articles that a server stores and makes available to users. Each usenet server has a set amount of storage, much like a home computer. The amount of usenet article data that is able to be stored is the retention, which is usually expressed as a number of days. 650 days of binary retention means that the hardware is capable of storing 650 days worth of binary articles.
All of the usenet posts made each day are collectively known as the “usenet feed”. The usenet feed is constantly growing as more and more articles are posted daily. Depending on whom you ask, the usenet feed is currently around 4-6 TB per day, which is a staggering amount of data. The hardware costs for a redundant, secured system to handle that kind of storage is a massive capital expense and the primary reason that usenet providers simply can’t have unlimited retention, or keep all articles forever.
There are two primary types of retention that customers should be concerned with, text group retention and binary group retention. Different types of groups offer different amounts of retention because the storage needs are significantly different. The average message size in a binary group is much larger than the average message size in a text group, not to mention the larger number of articles posted to a binary group. As of this writing NewsgroupDirect offers around 4.5 years of text retention and nearly 2 years of binary retention.
One downside to the increasing retention in the usenet world is in how articles are accessed. When retention was much lower it was possible to simply download all of the headers for a given group and then decide what messages you wanted to download or open. Now, just retrieving the headers for some groups can take several hours. As retention grows it becomes increasingly difficult to manage within a newsreader. Some modern usenet additions, such as message-id searching, have allowed newsreaders to circumvent the large amount of data now present.