News Service Review
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News Service- 307 days binary retention |
Pricing Plans
Retention
- 307 Days of Binary Retention
- 1452 Days of Text Retention
Plan Types
- Monthly Plans: No
- Block Plans: No
- Metered Plans: Yes
Misc
- Completion: 99.8%
- Newsgroups: unknown
- Connections: Up to 10 connections
News Server Addresses
Review Of News Service
One of the veterans, they have been offering usenet access for 15 years. They are from Europe, more specifically, they are based in the Amsterdam, Netherlands. Certainly, they are very experienced in providing usenet service, but unfortunately, they have been lately a subject of legal problems, but we will come to that later.
Servers
Unfortunately, there is no information about server address, although, if you’re a visual type, it is good to know you can enjoy the images from their datacenter. The Usenet data is stored by News-Service on hundreds of servers and thousands of hard drives hosted in professional data centers. The server farm is fully redundant and extremely scalable, allowing them to rapidly meet the customer’s growth. They own and operate a low-latency, multi-homed tier-1 network that is build on high quality equipment, has several 10-Gigabit connections to internet exchange points throughout Europe, to several high quality tier-1 carriers and to several large ISPs. The SSL encryption is provided to all the customers. The alternative ports are also available: 7 alternative ports for downloading without SSL enabled and 4 alternative ports for downloading with SSL enabled.
Retention and completion
The actual binary retention is 307 days and actual text retention is 1452 days. The completion rate is 99.8%.
Pricing
They do not offer the accounts or individual users. You only have option to become a reseller. All you have to do is to send the e-mail to their sales departments and in that mail, you should mention your wishes and provide the basic information (personal name, company name, etc). News-Service only charges data which is the direct result of the ARTICLE, BODY and HEAD NNTP commands. In other words, this means that the reseller will only be charged for the actual downloaded data, will not be charged for downloading headers, for the overhead caused by TCP/IP and for posting articles. Finally, the customers can be charged based on the actual amount of downloaded data, per account basis or based on the actual used bandwidth. They do not state the prices for these services on their website.
Legal issues
Recently, they have been sued by Stichting Brein on claims that they facilitates copyright infringement and the Brein is demanding that the company ceases to offer copyright material or, as a second option, faces fines of €50,000 per day. Patrick Schreurs, technical director of the News Service, refutes Brein’s claims and also claims that the company provides nothing but access to Usenet. He also claims that it is only a mere conduit of information. He also states that their company could not pay that fine for a longer period and that they would probably stop providing the usenet access. On 07 Jul 2010, they have posted a message on their website that the court gave both parties the opportunity to submit a reply and rejoinder prior to the next judgment. The Brein contacted them that they would need more time for submitting their reply. According to the information, Brein will reply on 4 August 2010 and News-Service will issue a rejoinder on 27 October 2010.
Recommendation
They offer decent service, solid retention times but as we have already mentioned, they do not offer the accounts for individual users. Finally, the future of the company is somehow uncertain because of the legal issues they are currently suffering from.
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