Providers & Accounts

The commercial side of Usenet and what the numbers on a provider's spec sheet actually mean. This section defines backbones and resellers, retention versus completion rate, unlimited plans versus block accounts, and connection limits. Read this before comparing two providers on advertised figures alone.

45 terms in this category.

Usenet Provider: A company selling access to Usenet servers, typically as a monthly subscription or a prepaid block of gigabytes. Service is defined by a handful of spec-sheet numbers: retention in days, completion rate, allowed connections, speed cap, and whether SSL is offered. Some providers own their server infrastructure; most retail brands resell wholesale capacity bought from a larger operator.
Usenet Backbone: An operator that runs its own news servers, spool, and peering arrangements rather than buying capacity from someone else. A backbone stores the articles physically and sets the real retention and completion figures behind every brand that resells it. Because several retail brands often sit on the same backbone, two accounts bought from different websites can return identical missing articles.
Reseller: A retail brand that buys wholesale capacity from a backbone and sells accounts under its own name, billing, and support. Resellers set their own prices and connection limits but cannot exceed the retention or completion of the backbone underneath them. Most Usenet brands are resellers, which is why checking which backbone a service runs on matters more than comparing logos.
Unlimited Account: Sold as a monthly or yearly subscription with no cap on gigabytes downloaded. Price is set by contract length, connection count, and sometimes a speed tier. Almost every unlimited plan carries a fair use policy allowing the provider to shape traffic from extreme accounts, so unlimited means no hard quota rather than no limits at all. Unused time does not carry over.
Block Account: A prepaid bundle of gigabytes, commonly 25 GB to 1 TB, that stays valid until the data is used up. Blocks have no monthly fee and usually no expiry date, which makes them a cheap second source on a different backbone: the downloader fetches whatever the primary account is missing and burns only those few gigabytes.
Metered Account: Any plan where downloaded volume is counted against a fixed allowance, whether that allowance resets monthly or is bought once as a block. Traffic is measured at the server, so failed articles, header downloads, and PAR2 repair blocks all count. Metered plans suit light or occasional use; heavy binary downloading exhausts a small allowance in hours rather than weeks.
Retention: The number of days a server keeps articles available before they age out of the spool. Figures above 5,000 days are common, but they are measured from the date the operator started archiving, so they describe the oldest article held rather than a guarantee that everything from that period survives. Completion rate determines whether an old download actually finishes.
Binary Retention: Retention measured for groups carrying encoded files, quoted separately because binaries consume nearly all of a provider's storage. A petabyte-scale spool is needed to hold a decade of binary posts, so this figure is the expensive one and the one marketing pages lead with. Binary retention below roughly 3,000 days makes older releases hard to complete without a second backbone.
Text Retention: Retention for discussion groups, which hold only plain articles a few kilobytes each. Because text costs almost nothing to store, many servers keep it far longer than binaries, sometimes back to the 1990s or indefinitely. Quoted as a separate number on spec sheets; a service advertising 6,000 days of text and 3,000 of binaries is storing two very different volumes of data.
Completion Rate: The percentage of articles from a given period that a server genuinely holds and can serve. Retention says how far back the spool reaches; completion says how much of it survived propagation gaps and expiry. A provider quoting 5,000 days but 92% completion on old material leaves PAR2 repair or a second server to fill the holes.
Allowed Connections: The number of simultaneous NNTP sessions an account may open, typically 8 to 60 depending on the plan. Each connection carries one article stream, so raising the count increases throughput until the line saturates. Past roughly 20 to 50 the gain is negligible and extra sessions mostly add latency and server load. Exceeding the limit rejects the surplus connections.
Speed Cap: A ceiling the provider places on an account's download rate, used to separate cheaper tiers from full-speed plans. Caps are expressed in megabits per second and enforced at the server, so no client setting works around them. Uncapped plans deliver whatever the line and connection count allow; a capped plan of 20 Mbit will not exceed roughly 2.5 MB per second.
Unmetered: Describes access billed by time rather than volume, with no counter running against downloaded gigabytes. The term appears on unlimited subscriptions to distinguish them from block accounts and monthly quotas. Unmetered does not mean unshaped: fair use clauses and speed caps still apply, and a provider may slow an account that sustains heavy transfer for weeks without ever charging for the data.
Fair Use Policy: The clause in an unlimited plan's terms that lets the provider throttle, shape, or cancel accounts whose usage sits far outside normal. It exists because a handful of accounts pulling tens of terabytes monthly cost more in transit than the subscription earns. Enforcement is usually a temporary speed reduction rather than termination, and the thresholds are rarely published as figures.
Free Trial: A short evaluation period, commonly 7 to 14 days or a fixed 10 to 50 GB, offered so a prospective subscriber can measure real speed and completion before paying. Trials normally require card details and convert to a paid plan unless canceled. Because trial accounts often run at reduced connections or a lower speed tier, results can understate what a paid account delivers.
Header Access: Permission to download group overview data, the subject, poster, date, size, and message ID lines used to build a local index. Some cheap or text-only plans restrict it, and pulling full headers for a large binary group can transfer several gigabytes, which counts against a metered allowance. Most downloaders now rely on NZB files from indexers instead of local header scans.
Multi-Server Setup: Configuring a downloader with two or more accounts at different priority levels: an unlimited subscription as priority zero and a block account on an unrelated backbone below it. Articles missing from the first server are requested from the second, so the block is consumed only on failures. The arrangement helps only when the servers sit on genuinely separate backbones.
Primary Provider: The account a downloader tries first, set at the highest priority and normally the unlimited subscription with the best retention and connection count. Nearly all traffic runs through it, so its completion rate determines how often the backup is touched. Client software falls through to lower-priority servers only after the primary returns a missing-article response for a segment.
Secondary Provider: A lower-priority account used to fetch what the primary cannot supply, usually a small block on a different backbone. Choosing one on the same backbone as the primary adds nothing, since both draw from the same spool and will be missing the same articles. Independent backbones are few, so the useful question is which one a brand actually runs on.
Bulk Provider: An operator selling capacity wholesale rather than to end users, typically in terabyte lots or as unbranded server access that a reseller puts its own storefront on. Pricing is per gigabyte or per connection and terms are contractual rather than click-through. The category also covers cheap high-volume retail plans stripped of support, SSL options, or full connection counts.
EU Backbone: Server infrastructure and spool located in Europe, most often the Netherlands or Germany. Latency is lower for European subscribers, and the region hosts a large share of the world's binary capacity. Several retail brands resell the same European infrastructure, so two accounts bought from different websites can turn out to read from one spool.
US Backbone: Server infrastructure and spool hosted in the United States. Round-trip times are lower for North American subscribers, which matters more for the many small requests a newsreader makes than for raw throughput. Operators in different regions maintain independent spools, so completion for a given release can differ between a US backbone and one hosted elsewhere.
Provider Peering: The exchange of article feeds between operators, which is how a post reaches servers other than the one it was injected into. Peering quality decides how quickly and completely a backbone receives new articles; gaps in peering show up later as permanently missing segments. Retail resellers do not peer at all, since they read from their upstream's existing spool.
Article Age: How long ago an article was posted, measured from its Date header and reported by indexers alongside each release. Age matters because completion falls as articles approach a server's retention limit, and because older sets have had more time to lose individual articles. A three-year-old release may need PAR2 repair; a three-day-old one usually downloads without incident.
Retention Days: The unit retention is advertised in, counted backward from today to the oldest article a server still holds. The figure grows by one each day for an operator that has never expired anything, which is why published numbers climb steadily and why two providers founded years apart cannot be compared on this number alone. Text and binary counts are quoted separately.
Account Credentials: The username and password a newsreader sends with the AUTHINFO command to open an authenticated session. Providers issue them at signup and they are usually distinct from the website login. Because they are transmitted on every connection, using an SSL port keeps them off the wire in plaintext. Sharing them widely triggers connection limits and account suspension.
IP Authentication: An alternative login method in which the server recognizes a registered IP address and accepts connections without a username or password. Common on business and bulk accounts and on setups where the client cannot store credentials. It breaks whenever the address changes, so subscribers on dynamic addresses and VPN users generally stay with AUTHINFO logins instead.
VPN Bundle: A subscription that packages Usenet access with a VPN service, usually at a small premium over the newsgroup plan alone. The VPN is typically a rebranded third-party network rather than one the provider operates. Since NNTP over an SSL port is already encrypted end to end, the bundle mainly addresses ISP traffic shaping and general browsing privacy rather than download security.
Block Expiry: Whether a prepaid gigabyte block has a deadline attached. Most blocks never expire, which is what makes them useful as a standing backup source consumed only when the primary server misses articles. A minority of plans attach a one or two year limit, and some providers void unused data if the account sits idle, so terms are worth reading before buying a large block.
Usage Meter: The counter in a provider's control panel showing gigabytes consumed against a block or monthly allowance. Server-side measurement includes header fetches, failed article attempts, and repair blocks, so the figure usually exceeds the size of files successfully written to disk. Meters update on a delay of minutes to hours, which is why a client's own statistics and the panel rarely match exactly.
Rollover: Carrying unused allowance from one billing period into the next. Rare on Usenet subscriptions, where monthly quotas normally reset to zero and unused gigabytes are lost. The behavior is standard on prepaid blocks instead, since block data has no monthly cycle to reset against and sits there until it is spent. Plans advertising rollover usually cap how many months accumulate.
Trial Limit: The cap that ends a free trial, expressed as a number of days, a data allowance, or both. Trials also commonly restrict connections and speed, so a 10 GB trial run at four connections tests availability and completion rather than peak throughput. Providers tie trials to a card or address to stop repeat signups, and exceeding the limit stops service until the plan converts.
Provider Uptime: The proportion of time a server accepts connections and serves articles normally, usually quoted at 99.9% or better. Outages show up in a client as connection refused or reset errors and stalled queues rather than as an error page. Multi-server setups double as insurance against downtime, since the downloader falls through to the backup while the primary is unreachable.
Peering Agreement: The contract between two operators setting out which hierarchies they exchange, in what volume, and at whose cost. Terms decide whether a backbone receives a full binary feed or only text groups, which in turn sets what its subscribers can read. Agreements are private, so the practical evidence of a good one is high completion on recent articles.
Transit Feed: A paid article feed one operator buys from another to receive groups it does not get through mutual peering. Transit is billed by volume and is the main running cost of carrying binaries, which is why some servers drop the largest groups or carry them with reduced completion. Distinct from peering, where two parties exchange feeds without payment.
Independent Backbone: An operator whose spool, hardware, and feeds are its own rather than rented from another backbone. Only a handful exist worldwide, split between US and European infrastructure, and the dozens of retail brands on sale all trace back to them. Identifying which backbone a plan sits on is the only way to be sure a second account genuinely adds coverage.
White Label: An arrangement where a backbone supplies servers, provisioning, and billing hooks while a partner sells the service under an unrelated brand. The customer sees one company; the articles come from someone else's spool. White labeling explains why retail brands appear and disappear quickly and why several storefronts can show identical retention figures, prices, and outage windows.
Usenet Bundle: A package combining newsgroup access with extras such as a VPN, indexer membership, or extra block data, sold at a single price. Bundles raise the headline value of a plan without changing retention or completion, the two figures that decide whether downloads finish. Worth separating out when comparing plans, since a bundled indexer or VPN is often available cheaply on its own.
Account Sharing: Using one set of credentials across several households or handing them to others, prohibited by nearly every provider's terms. Detection relies on connection counts and simultaneous logins from unrelated addresses. Consequences range from refused connections once the limit is reached to suspension without refund. Shared credentials also leak: a password circulated widely ends up in credential-stuffing lists.
Simultaneous Connections: The count of NNTP sessions open at one moment across every client using an account. Downloaders open them in parallel because a single stream rarely fills a modern line; eight to twenty is enough for most connections. The total is shared, so a second machine or an automation tool competes for the same allowance and can trigger refusals.
Bandwidth Throttling: Deliberate slowing of a connection, applied either by the Usenet provider under a fair use policy or by an ISP targeting NNTP traffic. Provider-side shaping is tied to an account and lifts after usage drops; ISP shaping affects a port or protocol and often eases when traffic moves to an encrypted port. Sustained slow speeds with normal completion point at throttling.
Service Tier: One of several plan levels a provider sells, separated by connection count, speed cap, SSL availability, and sometimes retention or access to text groups only. Cheaper tiers exist to fill spare capacity rather than to be equivalent products, so a low-cost plan may carry the same spool with half the connections. Tier differences are enforced at the server, not in the client.
Monthly Quota: A fixed data allowance that resets at the start of each billing cycle, common on budget plans priced below unlimited service. Once the quota is spent, service either stops until the reset or drops to a reduced speed. Unused gigabytes rarely roll over. Header downloads and failed article requests count toward the total, so measured usage runs above the size of finished files.
Prepaid Block: The purchase model behind block accounts: a one-time payment for a set volume of data, drawn down as articles are fetched and with no recurring charge. Per-gigabyte pricing falls as block size rises, so a 1 TB block costs far less per gigabyte than a 25 GB one. Blocks are the usual way to keep a second backbone available without a second subscription.
Subscription Plan: Recurring billing for Usenet access, charged monthly, quarterly, or annually, with longer commitments discounted heavily against the monthly rate. What the plan defines is connections, speed, SSL access, and any data cap; retention and completion come from the backbone underneath and are identical across every plan on it. Cancellation normally leaves access running to the end of the paid period.

See the full Usenet glossary.

Providers & Accounts

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