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Summary: There are some good metered
providers, but in our opinion NewsGuy offers the
most bang for the buck. Simply put, we couldn't find
another provider that came close to delivering the
same account package for the price.
Download & upload speeds through NewsGuy were
consistently fast, their servers supported a
generous 32 concurrent connections, completion rates
were at 99+%, and we verified their retention to be
a solid 140 days across multi-part binary
newsgroups. In regards to speed benchmarks, we
retrieved 1,845 newsgroups per second when
downloading NewsGuy's group list, compared to 1,539
groups per sec at Easynews and 1,493 groups per sec
at Giganews. An upload of 3 MB took 72 seconds on
NewsGuy, versus 80 seconds at Easynews and 76
seconds at Giganews.
NewsGuy's account download capacity and pricing are
hard to beat, and they offer a number of plans (3
GB, 10 GB, 50 GB, Unlimited) including a free 2-day
/ 20 GB trial. Our favorite is their 50 GB option,
which costs as little as $8.33 month (cost per GB =
17 cents), but their 10 GB / $3.33 month and
Unlimited / $15.83 month are also attractive.
Unused download capacity automatically rolls over in
all of their metered accounts... so you never lose
what you don't use... and you'd be hard pressed to
find another provider that offers the list of extra
freebies that you get with a NewsGuy account.
Account activations are instant (no waiting periods)
and their free trial accounts are fully functional
(downloading, posting, etc.) NewsGuy's support staff
was easy to reach by email & phone (toll-free), and
their replies were quick and thorough, with an
average response time of 57 minutes. |
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