For many years, Giganews held the title as the retention champion. Its 200+ day retention has been long admired by file-sharers, as it provides assurance that dusty NZB files will still point to something relevant on Usenet. Lately, however, things have begun to heat up in the newsgroup market. Other top tier providers such as Astraweb and the Dutch provider XS News are pressuring the Usenet market into ever higher retention periods.

It could be argued that Giganews kicked off the retention build up we’re currently seeing back in July of 2007. This upgrade was significant because Giganews was the first Usenet provider to break 200 days of retention. In December of 2008, Giganews announced yet another upgrade, this time bringing their capacity potential to 240 days. However, because of the quick growth, users of this service noticed that retention rates had fallen to around 200 days before slowly recovering. While these moves helped solidify Giganew’s unrivaled position as the retention leader, other providers would soon offer comparable capacity.

Astraweb, another large top tier provider, has slowly chipped away at Giganew’s retention title. Their first move came in January of 2009, when Astraweb announced an impressive capacity of 270 days. Astraweb’s significant retention capacity and low cost access has contributed to this news provider’s “cool” factor, and Astraweb is a frequently discussed topic on various newsgroup forums.

So what is it about Astraweb that has everyone talking? Forum discussions often point out three qualities: they’re inexpensive, have excellent service, and a solid reputation. They also have an “alternative” image to Giganews, which has helped fueled online discussion about this service. The bottom line, most users note, is that for $11 a month, the service is hard to beat. And it doesn't hurt that Astraweb just announced yet another retention upgrade.

“Astraweb is pleased to announce that we have just completed an infrastructure upgrade to increase our retention storage to 365 days. Currently our server storage capacity stands at 365 days.”

Astraweb’s current retention is ~210 days, so there’s still quite some time between now and 365 days.

Date: 2009-03-16 Source: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1841