Airnews Review
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Airnews- unknown days binary retention |
Pricing Plans
- 300 Kbps - $9.95/mo.
- 450 Kbps - $14.95/mo.
- 750 Kbps - $24.95/mo.
- 1.25 Mbps - $39.95/mo.
- 2.50 Mbps - $69.95/mo.
- 4.0 Mbps - $99.95/mo.
Retention
- unknown Days of Binary Retention
- 140 Days of Text Retention
Plan Types
- Monthly Plans: Yes
- Block Plans: No
- Metered Plans: No
Misc
- Completion: 99%+
- Connections: Up to unknown connections
- SSL: No
- Payment Options: : Credit card, checking account
- Support Info: phone support: 800-232-4335
- Support Email: support@airnews.net
News Server Addresses
- library.airnews.net
Review Of Airnews
The Airnews is the usenet news service offering one of the best ratios between the pricing and the retention time. Let us first take a close look to their pricing options and the well-known retention times. Currently, they offer two packages for the clients:
- the first one has the pricing of $9.95 per month, has 2 high-speed connections and offers unlimited downloads
- the second one has the pricing of $19.95 per month, has 6 high-speed connections and also offers unlimited downloads
- although not a package, let us mention that they offer 7-day money-back guarantee if the client is not satisfied with the service
Although every company will claim that it has something that is “among the best in the industry”, the Airnews certainly can claim something that is no question about and that is the fact that they offer the retention times that are among the best in the industry. The binary groups are retained for 240 days on their servers; on the other hand, the text groups are retained for more than 2000 days. The completeness is as with the most usenet news services equaling 99% for multi-part binaries. Further, both packages that we have mentioned previous offer the unlimited downloads, meaning the user can download either very much or nothing at all and the price will remain the same; they don’t charge by GB.
They also claim to have one on the best customer support services, offering the support both through the telephone (toll-free in North America) and through the e-mail. As many other providers, they offer privacy claiming to have one on the most aggressive privacy policies in the industry. Naturally, the personal information of their clients will never be passed to the third parties. They also offer the article filtering, meaning, the junk messages, unwanted advertising and similar types of messages will be removed immediately. Let’s just say a few words about the 7-day money-back guarantee. Actually, anyone can try their service for free in the period of seven days without any other obligations or “hidden fees”.
The Airnews service itself is owned and operated by Internet America, which is one of the largest Internet providers in the state of Texas. During their existence, they have upgraded their systems couple of times so let’s take a brief look to some on the previous system information:
- In the year of 1999, Airnews was running on multiple DEC Alpha 2100A AXP servers with more than 1 gigabytes of DRAM each and multiple 5/300 or 4/275 processors running in parallel. Their network was connected to the Internet by multiple DS3s (43Mbit each), 10Mbit full-duplex Ethernet and 100Mbit FDDI links.
- Two years later, Airnews was running on multiple Compaq/DEC Alpha 4100A AXP servers and multiple 5/466 processors running in parallel. Their custom software allowed them to archive more than 20 million articles (this number was 9 million in 1999.)
- In the following year, they have upgraded their servers to at least 2 gigabytes of DRAM each. Their custom software did not have limitations regarding article archiving, stating that it can archive tens of millions of articles and retrieve them quickly.
As a conclusion, we can state that the airnews.com is a relatively small usenet company but could be interesting for many clients because of its low price and great retention times.
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