Question: what should my next NSP be?

[DM8Mydog]

Which -ONE- NSP would you recommend under the following conditions:
1) price is important,  (otherwise i might aswell stick with giga...)
2) any retention above 100 is fine (really at least 100, not advertised 100 and being less)
3) speed is barely an issue since my downstream is only 8mbit/s

I've used several NSPs in the past, (~##) =for how much I used them
UNS (~8months total, two different periods) - annoying or, I just startd using them when they having problems, twice. (price was the best I knew, at the time I used them)
thundernews - (~2-3months) meh so-so, I used them between my two UNS accounts, price was a tad higher iirc, but the service was a lil bit better.
usenet.com - a joke, the worst I've tried. 1 month then gave up. price was low though.
hitnews (~2-3 months) - so cheap that any problems didn't matter, even with my slow speed they didn't max it up (lingered well below 800kcps), retention wasn't great.
Giganews (~less than a year) - my current NSP, price is too high and I'd rather switch to something cheaper, retention is sweet as is speed (860+kcps). The only annoyance is the rare old post I try to download that has been nubbed (1st part on each file missing). another negative vote on them is that I'm not allowed to post, at all.

P.S. I haven't gone NSP shopping in a while, I'm aware that prices are totally changed and retention is commonly at 160, where it used to be 60 or 100 :O

so who do you recommend?
and, ...has anything changed on the NSPs I previously tested?

[scarney]

Astraweb gets my vote. $11 a month, 20 connections, 170 day retention. or $39 3 months, 20 connections, 170 day retention and growing. the $11 deal they have going on right now is $11 for the lifetime of the account. cant really be beat atm.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21692778-Sign-up-at-Astraweb-now-to-pay-11month-for-LIFE

also look at  Usenet Now: http://www.usenetnow.net/ did some beta testing of their servers awhile back (one of the owners is a regular at dslreports.com. very solid while testing.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21460127-Newsgroups-New-Usenet-Server-Launching-Shortly-Need-Some-Beta

EDIT: forgot to add Usenet Now is $12 a month. pretty good deal.

[MajesticJG]

I just had to try AstraWeb at that price. I do like GigaNews. Great service, but Astraweb is just as fast (for me) and SO much less expensive. Thanks for the tip!

[mysteryman]

One thing to note about usenet-now. Their servers are in the same datacenter as xennews/hitnews. This may be a good thing or bad thing, depending on how you look at it.

Some may have a greater percieved privacy level because the datacenter is not in usa. However, there is a downside... I have a 20m connection and have used hitnews/xennews for the past year. I have not had much to complain about, it maxed me out every time. Or, so I thought, until I switched to astraweb last week.

While hitnews/xennews maxed me out (flat line), it was only after enabling 10+ threads. This created a bit more overhead on my system. Astra was able to max my line with only 4. It did not even break a sweat. Granted, YMMV and it has a lot to do with routing between different countries/isps. However, its something to consider if you want the fastest of the fast.

The best thing anyone can tell you is to look into all the pros/cons and make an educated decision. Right now, I'd say the best bang for your buck is astra; lock them in at 11/mo before they increase because of their new (coming) retention. Usenetnow is a hair above astra's retention atm, but not for long; astraweb announced a 270day goal earlier this month. Hit/xen/unn just recently finished an upgrade, I would not expect a massive upgrade from their current ~180-200 any time soon (maybe they will surprise me).

If you want to have a rough idea how it might perform, start a free trial on xennews.com. They use different auth servers... but the same data afaik.