Tera News Review
Last Updated: Feb 09, 2021
The Tera News website is no longer active. Should it be available, this Usenet provider still has a very outdated service.
Deals / Special Offer / Discounted Pricing
Tera News is offering commercial quality Usenet news access for free, you only need to pay $3.95 as set-up fee. You will not have access to binary files however and the retention is not great but it will do for a test newsgroups.
Free Trial
There is no free trial offered by Tera News for a complete Usenet service.
Plan / Price Offerings
There are number of options available, but let’s start with the most popular one. They have an option where the user can get discounted account ($3.95 one time setup fee) and by subscribing to this account, the user will get no censorship, no logging, no throttling of download speed and anonymous unlimited posting.
In this free account, daily download limit is 50 MB. Besides this offer, there are some other daily block pricing options and the listing follows:
- 250 MB /daily: $7.95 / monthly
- 750 MB /daily: $11.95 / monthly
- unlimited downloads: $14.95 / monthly
The monthly block offers 10GB of download limit and has a pricing of $9.95. Finally, they also have something that is called new sponsor package which gives 30GB per year and the pricing of $29.95 per year as well.
Connection Speeds / Server Locations
We haven’t had the opportunity to test the speed of Tera News’ so we can’t say for sure but since you pay per data downloaded it doesn’t really matter all that much.
There are number of servers available, according the options selected:
- public.teranews.com (free read only public server)
- free.teranews.com (50 MB a day free with posting)
- news.teranews.com (port 119 or 443)
- ssl.teranews.com (port 563 or 80)
- unlimited.teranews.com
The first server listed offers the user the option to try their service without opening the account. All that needs to be done is to configure the newsreader to use the public server without the need of username and password.
Certainly, this type of access has some limitations; no posting is allowed and the public servers have limits on download speed and the total number of users at once. Regarding SSL encryption, it is available over ports 563 or 80.
Technical Notes
There is no other technical information on Tera News’ website.
Quality of Service
We have not tested the service, and their website does not provide a lot of information either. According to some sources we have gathered, though, retention for both binary and text groups is 90-180. There is no information about the completion rate.
Customer Service
Customer support of Tera News is through email.
Conclusion
If you are interested in downloading binary files look elsewhere ie our list of Best Usenet Services otherwise $4 for a one-time charge to access the text groups sounds reasonable.
