Under Review: Newshosting
We have used multiple providers in the past, testing both connection and stability and Newshosting has to be one of the best we have seen thus far.
From what we have seen, Newshosting (so far) has had a 0% downtime. Now when I say we put that to the test…I mean we REALLY put that to the test. Since most newsgroup applications record and save their queue information, this really isn’t much of a deal, but for some…it is. It also says a lot about a company’s reputation and pro-activeness to thwart network problems.
One of the biggest selling points of Newshosting, is that they have a retention period that is more than 1000 days!!! That’s not months..that’s YEARS until posts vanish from their servers. Just imagine how much information if just waiting for you. We have used companies in the past that had 60-150 day retentions. You get bored of those companies because you find that you miss out on a lot of stuff. Newshosting eliminates that problem completely.
Next we tested connections. They claim to allow 30-60 connections all at once from your PC. That’s a lot of connections, but is it true? Well, we wound up locking up 3 different machines because we opened all connections at once, and the connection was so strong…it flooded our network/ports and put the PC’s into a total panic. We even had to restart the router because for some reason…it got confused from it and Wifi was totally knocked down. Awesome!
Speed….now there’s an important factor! Tons of retention and enough connections to choke your computer to death…but does it happen quickly? The answer…yes. We tested from 2 different networks. One pulled an average of about 30mbits/s (3.5+MBytes/s), the other a whopping 50mbits/s (6.2MBytes/s). We wanted to go even higher than that but we didn’t have access to a faster ISP connection. This is more than enough to show a result though since I’ve had hard drives transfer information from one to another at a speed slower than that. Got a faster connection to test it with? Sign up with their trial and give it a try. Let us know what your results are and we will post them!
Other benefits? For the most part, pretty much all of their accounts offer unlimited downloads. They have an account where the monthly download is limited to a large number of gigabytes, but to switch up to the unlimited one is such a small difference in price that you might as well go all the way. They also offer encrypted connections which is cool and all of their accounts come with a free trial.
The conclusion: I’m impressed, we’re all impressed and you will be too! Especially if you LOVE to access everything your mind can absorb (and or your hard drives…whichever gives in first). Newshosting has to be the best Newsgroup provider we have ever experienced, and we back it 100% 🙂
