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Summary: Based on our review there were other
providers that offered more for less, so it was hard
to get excited by Newsgroupdirect. Their pricing was
attractive for metered accounts (only NewsGuy &
100Proofnews were cheaper), but their accounts
lacked some important features, and they had some of
the slowest download speeds that we tested. Given
the selection of quality providers out there,
Newsgroupdirect would not be our first choice
We were able to quickly download a newsgroup list
from Newsgroupdirect, but speeds dropped off once we
began to test file uploads and downloads. Their
upload speed was slow at 79 seconds, and their
download speed of 46 seconds was the slowest of all
the providers that we tested (NewsGuy - 17 seconds,
Giganews - 17 seconds
Newsgroupdirect's 20 connection limit is higher than
some (Supernews - 5) and less than others
(NNTPjunkie - 32), but if our speed tests are any
indication of their typical server performance, were
not sure how much use you would get of the 20
connections.
Their completion rate was similar to other providers
(99+%), and their retention was a solid 115 days
within the multi-part binary newsgroups.
On the surface their 60 GB account was attractive at
$13.58 month, until we learned that they delete
unused capacity (it doesn't rollover), and only 10%
of downloaded headers are free (anything beyond is
counted against your account's download quota). This
makes a provider like NewsGuy a much better value
(50 GB - $8.33 month) because their accounts offer
capacity rollover and free headers. Newsgroupdirect
has an unlimited plan ($15.83 month), but there are
other unlimited providers that off better account
pricing & features.
The only extras that Newsgroupdirect includes within
their accounts are SSL encryption and a free
newsreader... which does not stack up well to other
providers that include SSL, NNTP & Web access,
newsgroup search, rollover capacity, email boxes,
etc. It appears that their support staff can only be
reached by email, as our call to their listed phone
number was routed to an automated answering system.
It took 58 minutes to activate our account, and
their support staff had an average response time of
1hr. |
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